The Night Swimmers by Peter Rock

Rating: WARTY!

This was another waste of money from Chirp with whom I've had some success in garnering audiobooks for my collection. Read less than satisfactorily by Graham Halstead, the book is ostensibly an autiobiographical novel. I'm not sure if that's supposed to reference something Biblical - with the author's name being a twice told 'rock' set in stormy waters - and I really don't care anymore. This is the second novel by this author that I've tried to read and I didn't like the previous one (The Shelter Cycle) either! That novel also contained a creepy character. That was two years ago and unfortunately I'd forgotten I'd disliked his previous effort so much, otherwise I could have saved my money in not buying this one!

The story was set in a wooded area, with cabins, bordering Lake Michigan, but despite that, to me it was boring as hell with the author rambling endlessly into descriptive writing much as he rambled through the woods, but without moving the story forward in inch. He seems obsessed with the word 'shadow', or shadows', or 'shadowy' and after a handful of chapters I gave up on it because I lost all interest in what had sounded, potentially, like an interesting story, but which became an author's obsession with his own love of his own voice. None of the writing interested me in either the characters or the surroundings. It did give me an idea for a story so it was not a total loss, but whether or when that might get written is unclear at this point!

The author tells a story of his stay at the cabins and his other obsession, which was a young widow by the provocative name of Mrs Abel. I immediately suspected her of having murdered her husband (note the name, 'Abel' - another Biblical reference?!), but I lost interest in pursuing the story for the purpose of discovering what actually was going on. Frankly, the way this was written, the narrator (the author if this was indeed autobiographical) comes off as a creep and a stalker. I cannot commend this at all based on what I heard of it.

The Shelter Cycle by Peter Rock

Rating: WARTY!

I don't know if Peter Rock is the author's real name or not. If it is, his parents evidently didn't know that Peter and Rock mean the same thing. It would be like naming him Rocky Rock! Or more a propos, naming me Woody Wood. And yes, I know where you're going with that, but I'm not going there with you!

I did not like this audiobook. Amy Rubinate's reading was flat and uninspiring, and the story itself was boring and so far out there on the edge as to be lost in the haze. The story is of Francine, who used to be friends with Colville fifteen years before, when they were children and a part of a religious cult (full disclosure: to me all religions are cults!), but they haven't seen each other since the religious prophecies predictably failed, as they always do, and the cult broke apart under its own unsustainable weight as all religions do in one way or another.

Now Francine is married to Wells and they're expecting a child. Perhaps at this point, you see why I opened this by talking about the author's name. I couldn't help but wonder if he had been somehow marked for life by his name, and this is why his characters (male ones at least) have such unusual names like Colville and Wells. But Anyway, Colville shows up out of the blue having tracked Francine down. He claims he is there to help find this young girl who has disappeared from the village, but he really doesn't help in the search and seems much more interested in reconnecting with Francine than in anything else, and perhaps connecting with her as yet unborn child from what I've read in reviews of others. I wisely DNF'd it.

Colville is so creepy as to be stomach-turning, yet neither Wells nor Francine really view him that way, although Wells is predictably more inclined to do so than is his wife ever is. She voluntarily meets with her childhood friend in his motel room at one point because he asked her to. It was at this point that I quit listening because the story was a drag. It was taking forever, going nowhere, and everyone seemed so passive that I imagined the author manipulating them like clay animation figures when he wrote this: people who had to be meticulously positioned over lengthy periods of time before the next vignette in the series could be snapped. Yawn. They felt to me to be the very antithesis of dynamic, and it when I realized that it was never actually going to be animated, that I quit listening.

The author should have dedicated this: For Mica, it was so thin. I cannot recommend a pile of schist like this. I would have preferred a stony silence. I have no desire to read anything else by this author.