Greg Hill

Yes, Matt. I hate it after a million words.

Revisado: 12-27-23

The pacing is absolute rubbish, again. This far in and I'm more invested in how Lizzo's diet's going than in Carl's incredibly banal daddy issues. It begins to feel like a spoof of itself by falling into all the worst pitfalls of bad reality tv plotting.

[Pause any meaningful review progress here and the repeat THE RIVER ROARING, DROWNING OUT ALL PACING to yourself for the next ten minutes before proceeding]

Pointless agonizing over situations this reader can no longer get invested in because I know it'll be replaced by something else bigger and more agonizing via Deus Ex Machine right after the author has wasted my time having the protagonists cry about it for awhile, then making an elaborate plan to deal with the problem and executing half the damn plan.

Oh, and one Soundbooth Theater gripe. Whenever Matt doesn't know what to do next and Carl is already crying (since "Have Carl cry" is his most used macro), he reaches for the "HAVE DONUT SCREAM" button. These sudden shifts in tone and volume needed to be handled responsibly and they were not. I like Donut. Donut's character is the last redeeming quality of the series. All Carl does that doesn't annoy me anymore is be a comic foil for Donut. This complaint is solely about the mishandling of the audio mixing in 27 hour production that relies on DONUT SCREAMING for a heck of a lot of that runtime.

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Yes, Matt. I hate it after a million words.

Revisado: 12-27-23

The pacing is absolute rubbish, again. This far in and I'm more invested in how Lizzo's diet's going than in Carl's incredibly banal daddy issues. It begins to feel like a spoof of itself by falling into all the worst pitfalls of bad reality tv plotting.

[Pause any meaningful review progress here and the repeat THE RIVER ROARING, DROWNING OUT ALL PACING to yourself for the next ten minutes before proceeding]

Pointless agonizing over situations this reader can no longer get invested in because I know it'll be replaced by something else bigger and more agonizing via Deus Ex Machine right after the author has wasted my time having the protagonists cry about it for awhile, then making an elaborate plan to deal with the problem and executing half the damn plan.

Oh, and one Soundbooth Theater gripe. Whenever Matt doesn't know what to do next and Carl is already crying (since "Have Carl cry" is his most used macro), he reaches for the "HAVE DONUT SCREAM" button. These sudden shifts in tone and volume needed to be handled responsibly and they were not. I like Donut. Donut's character is the last redeeming quality of the series. All Carl does that doesn't annoy me anymore is be a comic foil for Donut. This complaint is solely about the mishandling of the audio mixing in 27 hour production that relies on DONUT SCREAMING for a heck of a lot of that runtime.

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I made it to the part with the minigun.

Revisado: 11-07-22

Some way in to chapter 8. It’s nauseatingly predictable, unfunny in that special, horrible way of something trying to be funny. It’s a zombie story you’ve heard about 100 times before with lots of asides to kill the pace of any scene that might have a bit of tension.

Boring but easily digestible. It’s like a zombie Clive Cussler. Feed an AI a few dozen zombie apocalypse books and it could spit out this whole series. Zombie oatmeal.

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A sophomore success!

Revisado: 07-19-22

This second entry in the Abner Fortis series changes a lot but retains the fantastically paced narrative and wonderful narration.

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1% plot, 99% gibbering

Revisado: 06-22-21

There’s a solid idea here buried under god awful execution. It is absolutely not an exaggeration to say that the book is entirely made up of the protagonist Lloyd calling himself a loser and screeching annoyingly. It’s not the narrator’s fault, he’s insufferable because the character who narrates is insufferable.

This is bad enough to call the publisher’s entire catalog into question. I’ll be avoiding any more of these Publisher’s Packs of abattoir run off in the future.

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Failed Attempt at a 3rd Order Idiot Plot

Revisado: 06-16-21

The 3rd Order Idiot Plot is one that only works if everyone involved in the story is an idiot, existing in a universe where everyone is an idiot, and if all of the audience are also idiots. That last requirement is thankfully harder to pass than the author seems to believe.

It's an idea so lame it nearly sent my eyes rolling out of my head, that is initially rescued by great execution and then shoots itself in the back of the head 23 times with pointless sub-plots, failed foreshadowing and a laughable attempt to throw some moral ambiguity back into the story to pay off the way it was introduced in the early chapters. The last chapter was so painfully drawn out between the tortuous dialogue and the two miserable drawling voices Luke Daniels was forced to put on, that I couldn't finish it.

The plot is basically lame and it was leaning a bit too hard on "Kids today with their instagrams and facebooks", but it managed to pitch what seemed like it could be a pretty serviceable horror story. It's spends so much time establishing how this incredibly dumb circumstance could come to pass, that it has to undercut that narrative at the same time to establish how it would also go so ultimately wrong. But it keeps moving and talking fast, so you don't really get to dwell on it until the pacing hits a bloody brick wall in the storm shelter section. The storm shelter with no battery powered emergency lights. From that point forward, the plot convenient contrivances really don't let up.

The format is awful. I really think this good have been a better story if had been told properly instead of kitbashed together from a pile of author's notes. The interview format lends it nothing. The unreliable narrators aren't. The ambiguity isn't. A charming psychopath leads a bunch of pricks to murder and maim several people within 24 hours of exiting the storm shelter and everything that follows is more or less a direct result of that.

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Pleasantly Suprised

Revisado: 06-29-19 El oyente recibió este título gratis

I know I really shouldn't decide what a book's about by the cover, but it's a good cover! I like space ships and I'm a niche fan of stories about deep space salvagers making their livelihoods from the refuse of space. Maybe they hit it big on a battlefield, maybe the find ancient alien civilizations, maybe they just methodically build an empire of rubbish.

Well, I wasn't super wrong or anything. You get all that and a few bonuses. In no particular order: Mech Combat, Space Georgia (You might mistake it for Space Texas, but there are subtle differences for the connoisseur), demure space hotties, lots of alien snacking (not a euphemism) and Space Possums in lipstick (presumably Space Lipstick). You also get some great voice acting. Only Southerners can do Southern accents, so KC Johnston brings much needed twang and drawl to those characters what need it, but still elocutes worthily in very important "funny alien" and "hungry alien" roles as well as the critical "clear narrator" role.

What you're not getting is a very arduous, po-faced milsf full of grim and graphic. Things aren't all laughs, it's got some bloody bleak moments that would seriously scar a person experiencing them firsthand, but the effect on the reader is limited to understanding what the characters are going through without needing to finish the book feeling like Lev Tolstoy has been hitting them with it for 7 hours. I really wanted to just say it's all light and air and irreverence because that's impression I'm left with.

I'm writing as I've just gotten the third book in the trilogy and I'm going to relisten to the first two before I start it. Not because I might have forgotten some critical plot details, but because I just want to. It's a fun way to spend ~7 hours while playing vidya.

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Audible Recycling

Revisado: 11-17-18

Twain's Feast was in particular of shockingly poor quality. To be clear, this was the research for, creation of, and partial filming for an unsold pilot show for television. What we've been presented with are the narrator's audio links joining up audio culled from filming and producers doing research prior to shooting that never took place.

Numerous references to the fact that they were filming are left in, along with an extreme amount of dead air between lines/bits. Guests are named, and never spoken to again. The narrators repeatedly point to things we can't see, because this was filmed, not merely recorded audio (Look at..., See that...). It might have been interesting to see the television program originally intended, but given what bits were culled to make this Audible Original, I can see why no network was willing to fund it.

I got it for free and I still feel ripped off.

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From most of the creators of Authors and Dragons!

Revisado: 10-23-18

I laughed.
I wept.
I soiled myself.

Are there truly any bad people or are there just bad decisions? Shingles holds the answer. Both exist and lubricated with unspeakable amounts of alcohol, they created this audio tome we see before us. I hope Cassandra Myles was not overly traumatized by the experience as I would like to hear more from her in the future.

I must give this book my highest recommendation. We have a responsibility to keep these diseased minds focused on literature lest they begin to wander. Just imagine the harm they could cause in politics, or food service...

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May Tworag bury us in his audio effluence!

Revisado: 05-25-18

Come brother! Herein lies everything you really wished never to find out about Silas Kane. Listen and learn from these scrolls, scavenged from the depths of Tworag's (Praise Tworag!) least favorite colostomy bag.

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