By Mike Moyer
damn it. This is drift Makes me think.
Author KR Griffiths gives us a secretly angry lunatic with agoraphobia, a slacker security guard, four brothers who might be terrorists, and a velociraptor-like vampire who has a baby with Slender Man.
They’re trapped on a cruise ship, and when the power goes out, spindly vampire-like velociraptors gleefully carve through thousands of passengers, leaving the ship in a pitch-black, floating death box.
Vampires go on a killing spree with plenty of graphic, realistic kills. Griffith offers a unique take on the vampire myth, including an entertaining take on the power of its charm. (These vampires are more interested in having you cut off your body than using their hypnotic techniques for some undead sexy time.)
There’s something claustrophobic and chilling about watching our team of heroes trudging around a cruise ship in the dark while vampires hunt them.
but…damn it.
The problems with this book can be summarized as follows: There are too many words, and a lot of them are repetitive. I began to suspect that everyone on the ship covered their mouths. Everything here is covered up. The screams are covered up, the curses are covered up, and even the gunshots are covered up.
There’s also quite a bit of “pain.” Pain fills your mind, howls of agony, screams of pain. Do we really need to be told that a person who has just been eviscerated by a vampire using a machete as a toenail is in pain?
In the first two pages, we see a long meditation on screaming. The character can’t believe she Actually screaming, Then goes on to compare how screaming while being hunted by a killer is different than screaming about spiders in your living room.
Well, nothing.
The characters constantly reflect on how scared they are. Man, we get it. You’re stuck on a ship, surrounded by monsters. We get it, it’s terrifying.
Vampires don’t escape lengthy descriptions either. We get a detailed description of them midway through the story, but as the perspectives shift, Griffith often gives us a new description of every… damn… character.
They’re tall, ugly, and look like they’re made of razor blades. Got it. Keep going. If you’re going to describe them again, give me something new.
Griffith seems afraid to let the story speak for itself. Which is bad, because the story is great. The words just get in the way.
This isn’t to say that Griffith is a bad writer. The problems in this novel could be fixed with another draft. This is a common problem with self-published work. All writers think their latest draft is the best, but in reality they really need to write another draft or two.
If Griffith had deleted fifty pages of useless material from the manuscript, drift It’s going to be great.
But as it stands, these super scary monsters are outclassed by an even uglier creature: the beast we call “bad editing.”
Order yours here.
score: 2.5/5
