Author: Terry Lloyd Vinson

ISBN:B0009YL1DW

The following review was contributed by: John Walsh & CLICK TO VIEW John Walsh's Reviews

In a remote government facility, besieged by hideous alien monsters, the last few remnants of human society wait for the final assault and try to maintain their morale. One man finds a stack of unlabelled DVDs and, to pass the time, the group sits down to watch. Unfortunately, each of the discs shows a film of unknown provenance but of staggering levels of horror, bloodshed and human misery. From wild miscegenated hybrids escaped from secret laboratories and running wild in the countryside to a nightmarish sequence of revisited murder in a psychiatric ward to a vicious dispute among demons in hell, the survivors are faced with extreme examples of the breakdown of society and of human interaction. Not only that, it is also possible that the entire situation is even more bizarre than it appears on the face of it as subsequent revelations make clear.

This is a book in desperate need of a competent editor. Not only would an editor have been able to eliminate the numerous spelling and grammatical errors that make reading the book a much less enjoyable affair than it might have been but, also, would have been able to advise on pace, logic and characterisation. There is, I think, a decent set of stories struggling to make themselves heard here but they are hampered by the structure and the flaws. This is a pity because the author has a good eye for the possible horror in everyday incidents and the development of an idea, albeit ideas developed consistently with the visual aspects much more strongly considered than the textual. In other words, all that happens, does so on the surface in a way that makes it easy to think of the book transferred to the small screen. It is unfortunate that so many writers these days seem to start from the belief that the visual medium is superior to the written one and to abandon or not even take up the craft of the writer.

The burst of new publishing companies and opportunities provides many ways for authors to reach print and this must be considered a good thing. The problem is when the benefits of the previous model are discarded without a suitable substitute being ready to take its place. How much better this book would have been had it passed through a rigorous proofreading and editing regime; then we would much more easily have been able to witness the author’s talent.

John Walsh, Shinawatra University, August 2005