Lore of Rainbow by Vera Nazarian

Rating: WARTY!

This is a prequel to the author's Lords of Rainbow which I shall never read because this effort completely turned me off. The language was way-the-hell too florid and rambling and I had no idea what this was about, much less what the succeeding story will be about, because after reading a third of this very short 'prologue' I was clueless as where it was going or what point it was trying to make. Worse, I had by then lost all interest in finding out. This is why I do not read prologues. They're utterly worthless, as is this.

Cobweb Bride by Vera Nazarian

Rating: WARTY!

For my very last review of 2020 before I take a well-earned break after fifteen straight months of 33 reviews a month, I'm sorry to report that it's a negative one! I don't even remember how I came to get this book, but now having read some of it, it seems to me that this is very much a rip-off of the BBC television serial Torchwood, specifically the fourth season, Torchwood: Miracle Day which was transmitted by the BBC in the summer of 2011, as well as on Starz in the USA. This novel trilogy was first published three years later, in 2014.

Like in Torchwood, death takes a holiday, with people failing to die even though they have a terminal illness or are 'killed' in battle. In this novel the reason is that 'Death' is looking for his cobweb bride and won't collect another body until he finds her. No one apparently has any idea what that means, nor does 'Death' enlighten them, which seems ridiculous to me. Thus the beginning of the novel describes - in the most disturbingly graphic terms - illness and horrific battle injuries, which turned me off. A bit of that to establish the story I can read, but when it seems to go on forever, and ever more graphically, I'm not a fan.

From there it devolved into a rambling story that seemed to go nowhere, switching characters almost as much as it switches paragraphs, and I lost both track of it as well as interest in it. I DNFd it, and I can't commend it based on the portion of it that I could stand to read.