A BJ Review: Withered + Sere (Immemorial Year #1) by T.J. Klune

Rating: 3 stars out of 5

Once upon a time, humanity could no longer contain the rage that swelled within, and the world ended in a wave of fire.

One hundred years later, in the wasteland formerly known as America, a broken man who goes only by the name of Cavalo survives. Purposefully cutting himself off from what remains of civilization, Cavalo resides in the crumbling ruins of the Northern Idaho Correctional Institution. A mutt called Bad Dog and a robot on the verge of insanity comprise his only companions. Cavalo himself is deteriorating, his memories rising like ghosts and haunting the prison cells.

It’s not until he makes the dangerous choice of crossing into the irradiated Deadlands that Cavalo comes into contact with a mute psychopath, one who belongs to the murderous group of people known as the Dead Rabbits. Taking the man prisoner, Cavalo is forced not only to face the horrors of his past, but the ramifications of the choices made for his stark present. And it is in the prisoner that he will find a possible future where redemption is but a glimmer that darkly shines.

The world has died. This is the story of its remains.

Like some DSP stories, this is not actually a romance and there is also no sex. It’s very dark, I knew that going in, violence, death and cannibalism in a barren, brutal wasteland with no laws. But none of those things bothered me in the least. Yet this story was hard for me in some ways, so should say those bits up front.

The beginning didn’t draw me in immediately. If I hadn’t been reading it for review, I’m not sure if I would have continued on because I was just really confused by it. The POV starts out omniscient but moves to being from Cavalo’s third person POV that starts out feeling distant (calling him the man and seeming outside of him) before slipping in closer and more into his head. There are still times later in the book when it almost seemed to slip back towards omniscient. I was actually about 20% in before I started feeling involved with the story.

Another thing that was hard for me is that there are quite a large number of scenes that are sort of dream or flashback or hallucination sequences that move around in time and place. In addition to bringing in backstory, these work to show how messed up the MC’s mind is—an insanity of a sort like when so much has happened that one cannot hold onto their mind. But there were quite a lot of them, some lengthy and involved, and it tended to pull me from the story.

For me, this book read like a nightmare… one where dark, scary, awful things happen but they just don’t fully make sense and then I wake up and still can’t put it all together and am left unsettled, confused, and shaking my head. That was how I felt at the end of this story. Perhaps some small part of this has to do with the cliffhanger ending but also to be perfectly honest, must admit that sometimes I felt lost.

Those things being said, this book has some fascinating post-apocalyptic world-building going on! While I didn’t feel a strong connection with the main characters, I did find both Bad Dog and the robot SIRS interesting and compelling. In fact, I think my favorite chapter of the book was “the ballad of bad dog.” When I read that title, I was so hesitant to read on as I know ballads are often tragic. But it actually not only tells the story of how Bad Dog came to Cavelo, but contains the most tender scene of the whole story.

It was my first read from this author, so I had no idea what to expect and tend to think after having read some blurbs and reviews from other stories, that it’s not representative of his work in general but rather a branching out into new areas.

The cover by Paul Richmond just absolutely creeps me out (and not in a good way)… luckily I had not seen it prior to requesting the story or might have had second thoughts. I’m not sure how exactly it relates to the story other than giving an impression of its awful, bleak world.

Overall, cover and story alike leave me with the feeling like awaking from a disjointed and unsettling nightmare. A nightmare that I will be compelled to revisit when book two comes out.

Sales Links: Dreamspinner Press | Amazon

Book Details:

ebook, 280 pages
Published April 19th 2016 by DSP Publications
Original TitleWithered + Sere
ISBN 1634765575 (ISBN13: 9781634765572)
Edition LanguageEnglish

A VVivacious Review: Mute Witness by Rick R. Reed

Rating: 4 Stars out of 5

Book Synopsis: When a little boy ends up missing, his parents’ lives are turned upside down and inside out. But the relief that comes when the boy is found is marred by the appalling truth that comes to light.

As Shelley tries to be strong for her son while holding herself together, things spin out of control. While Sean’s worry of how his homosexuality might be used as a weapon to keep him away from his only child in light of the abuse he has suffered, is realised. And will Jason speak up against his abuser or has this one event struck him mute forever.

The blurb of this book is very misleading. While I enjoyed the book so I didn’t really mind the misleading blurb but this book is actually about a child who is sexually abused and how this impacts his life and the lives of those around him. Sean being gay though deliberate on the part of the author is just another nuance to the story because this book is not about Sean being gay it is about Sean, a father whose son has been very brutally abused.

Now where this blurb is misleading is in the fact that I thought the events in this book would be narrated as per Sean or Austin’s POV or from their perspective. But this book has multiple POVs including those of Shelley (Jason’s mother), Paul (Shelley’s husband), Estelle (Shelley’s mother) along with Sean, Austin and Jason and all of them are equally important characters, if not more. Especially Shelley we spend quite a lot of time in her head.

This is also not a romance story and doesn’t focus on relationships outside of how this adverse event puts a strain on them. This story is about one horrifying precipitating event that leads to a chain of reactions that propels the characters in this story.

My one problem with the plot was the multiple POVs because as it so happens in multiple POVs the moment the narrative of a particular character becomes interesting we flip to another character who can’t add anything to the interesting titbit we just learned.

This book is a story of people under insurmountable anguish who must learn to live their lives all over again and how our actions at the time of adversity can have irreversible consequences. The characters in this book have a really gritty feel, like the reality of their situations makes itself known on the surface itself. As such the book focuses on a lot of people other than aforementioned six and we get to see their perceptions and motivations as well.

As such I see why multiple POVs work for this story as it helps to increase the scope of the story as well as to realistically portray the extent of damage one wrong thing can produce. Also I loved how we got two perceptions of people one of how they perceive themselves and one of how they were perceived by people who knew them and in some cases an additional third of how a casual bystander perceives them.

This story is riveting, once you start the book it is hard to stop in between as the story twists and turns with subtlety through the wide landscape of havoc that descends on the lives of two parents who love their son immensely.

A word of caution while reading this book is that you will need to keep an open mind and also the fact remains that this book is most definitely not a romance; it is more of a thriller with slight bits of mystery and suspense.

Cover Art by Aaron Anderson. I liked the cover a lot it aptly portrays the dumb horror of what the story holds in store for you.

Sales Links: Dreamspinner Press | Amazon

Book Details:

ebook, 2nd Edition, 290 pages
Published February 9th 2016 by DSP Publications (first published 2009)
Original TitleMute Witness
ISBN139781634763455
Edition LanguageEnglish

Review: The Night Visitor by Ewan Creed

Rating: 3 stars out of 5

Kevin fled his old life in St. Louis for a new startup in Memphis. New job, new place but that was about all. Then the dreams started, dreams that felt so real that Kevin wasn’t sure when he was awake and when he was asleep. Every night the same tattooed man gave him the most erotic, sexual experiences of his life. Then the dream starts reoccurring, in greater detail and with more vivid feelings then Kevin has ever experienced, until it starts to overwhelm Kevin’s new life. Then Kevin’s starts to wonder….is his night visitor real or imagined?

The Night Visitor by Ewan Creed left me with mixed emotions. An erotic short story, it starts out accomplishing its goal. Creed gives us a vivd sexual dream, Kevin’s erotic dream to be specific. It involves a rough looking tatted up man who Kevin pays to have sex with. It’s hot, the descriptions are sexy, and it works because the rough language goes along with the scene unfolding on the pages. Then the author reaches for more, more in plot, more in descriptive language, and it sort of falls to pieces.

This is our first sighting of “Vic”, the man of Kevin’s dreams:

Another man walked down the sidewalk towards him. He was tall and shirtless and moved with a swaggering confidence that came from knowing himself and knowing these streets. A dirty white wife beater was tucked into the waist of his low slung and tattered jeans. A large serpent tattoo wrapped around one shoulder, curling down his lean torso and disappearing below the elastic band of his underwear. The man looked side to side as he approached. Then he looked straight ahead. He caught Kevin’s eye and sneered.

His hair was buzzed beneath his side-angled ballcap. He looked to be a bad boy, a tasty piece of very rough trade. That was just the way Kevin liked them.

And the initial dream sequences work, the language and vocabulary is coarse, the sex dirty and hot. It’s all pretty erotic. But Creed has a larger agenda here, a larger plot than just the erotic dreams of a man in a new setting. And soon the narrative is muddied with dream within dream sequences that serve to confuse rather than elucidate and the descriptive terms turn from white hot and sexy to unintentionally humorous.

Vocabulary choices such as man meat, piss slit, fire hose, man meat, and (beautiful, glistening) tool just serve to tumble the narrative from the provocative into a giggling disbelief, never a goal for an author writing erotica. Authors have to be careful when choosing words to represent the human sexual anatomy because it can so often turn hilarious just when it needs to be smoking hot.*

While beautiful rod is no “purple pickle of passion” some of the other vocabulary choices come close. Plus we have pecker,prick, cock, tool, and man meat all used within a couple of sentences of each other (sometimes within the same sentence). It’s excessive, too many terms kill the erotic tones of the sex scene being described instead of heighten it.

Getting past the vocabulary, then my final issues are with the plot. I like what Ewan Creed was trying to achieve but I just don’t feel that it worked here. The Night Visitor needs either more volume, more pages to bring off the full plot the author has planned or it needed to be cropped down further to just a short erotic story. But by trying to pull off both elements in 52 pages, Creed ended up with a story that felt like an awkward combination of outright erotica and paranormal short story, seemly scattered and somewhat confusing.

I gave The Night Visitor a 3 star rating because there are good elements here as well as a promising plot. And while some of the vocabulary made me giggle it didn’t have me wanting to put the book down either. So you make up your own mind. I kind of enjoyed this one and you might feel the same. Consider this conditionally recommended.

Here is an example of what made me giggle: “The night visitor was a real fire hose.” “big juicy slab of meat”.

Book Details:

ebook, 13,000 words, 52 pages

Published September 25th 2013 by Wilde City Press

ISBN13 9781925031539

url Wilde City Press

*Vocabulary Gone Bad

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