House of Echoes by Brendan Duffy

Posted on by

House of Echoes is plagued with problems, from a clichéd plot ripped from X-Files episodes, to an entire lack of action/plot development to a complete and total non-suspension of disbelief. Couple all of these problems with some rich whiney city people who move to a not-rural Eastern town? (C’mon New York; move to Utah, Idaho, New Mexico, Colorado, Nevada, etc., the middle of these states, and then you can start complaining about rural life). It’s a recipe for a boring waste of time.
Read More →

The Reverie by Jason Shprintz

Posted on by

The Reverie is written well enough and it uses an interesting narrative tool.

Neither of those qualities is near enough to save it from a boring, long-winded plot and pointless scenes. Really, it could have been a novella and not lost anything.

This book was received, free of charge, from the Goodreads First Reads program.

Dangerous Heterosexuals by Paul Leeper

Posted on by

The only good quality about Dangerous Heterosexuals is the cover. The rest of it is worth throwing away. Pages upon pages upon pages of entirely pointless dialogue. Boring writing. No even casual copyediting was done before the book went to print.

According to the information in the book provided by the author, one of Leeper’s plays was nominated for an Edgar award and he has had many readings in big towns of his other plays.

Maybe that’s why he thought it was acceptable to include so much pointless dialogue. It’s not. If it were read as a skit or a one-act play, it still wouldn’t work.

Plus, the double spaces after the period (which look more like full indentations, and I think are at least quadruple spaces) and the horrible simple sentences. So many! So annoying!

Read More →

Dr. Vigilante by Alberto Hazan

Posted on by

The concept is ripe for a novel: doctor uses his access to patients, and trends, in the emergency room to carry out a war on the male criminal elements in the big apple.

The inherent tension in the idea would, seemingly, be enough fodder for a brilliant story. After all, it’s about a doctor who hurts people, and then proceeds to treat the people he’s intentionally harmed. A doctor violating his oath.
Dr. Vigilante does not live up to the lofty concept. It lives up to the pretension of a rich, hunky doctor living in New York City, who is written as a toned-down version of Batman.
The pretension, along with the terrible stereotypes and blatant sexism built into the plot, into the characters, even into the setting, helps drive this book down, down, down.

Read More →