Quote:
Originally Posted by phenomshel
Yes, y'all keep it up, please! I have added every recommendation in this thread to my "to buy" list. I'm having a blast!
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Well… I have a not-recommended to add (keep in mind I am a really tough reviewer, worse since I started writing). I picked up Vampires by John Steakley, just awful. The movie by John Carpenter was good entertainment, the book… ouch. I tried to put a review of it on Amazon but it isn’t showing up for some reason.
The author has a totally uncontrolled point of view so it bounces from one character to another in a single scene which gets very disorienting because he has so many characters. The bulk of the story is cheesy dialogue very little description. I couldn’t even really tell you who the main character is because it appears to change in the middle of the book. Hmm… it feels like there are two books crammed together.
The world-building doesn’t make sense, people don’t know there are vampires around but they are mindless killing machines infecting random small towns across the Midwest slaughtering with wanton abandon. The monsters aren’t well planned, there are mindless “new” vampires who are like zombies and then there are “master” vampires who throw charity events but you meet a “master” who has only been a vamp for 8 years? These questions are never answered. My husband suggested some sort of night school, a “master vampire” course that taught them how to tie their shoes and make small talk but the book never explains this.
The flow is awful. You get exciting action, and then back story about the vamp that was just killed. It would have been more effective if it was the other way around, now I don’t care, he’s dead lets move on. Lot of back story on a character I haven’t even met before and don’t care about. The climactic scene happens in the middle of the book and then the author seems to wander around like he forgot what was going on.
I gave it 2-stars. John Carpenter’s movie takes the first part of the book and then rewrites the second half to explain the vampires and gives the story a clean arc. Don’t read the book, watch the movie.