North Sea Requiem by A.D. Scott
My Rating: 1/5 Stars
“To a man with a hammer, everything looks like a nail.” – Mark Twain
With the publication of this review, Simon & Schuster and Atria executives will have bleeding ears and red faces and I’ll be placed in the crosshairs of a hit man named Jeb and I’ll be quietly removed from NetGalley and Amazon will put me in chains and lock me away and I’ll be alienated and isolated to the point that no one will talk to me but my wife and some little dog named Fluffy who will come and visit me when I’m put in an insane asylum and shoved in a straitjacket and thrust paper cups at random intervals filled with blue, white, and yellow pills.
If I could provide a one-sentence summary, it’d be as follows: Aspiring authors should read this novel for what not do as a writer. Forget Fifty Shades, this is your Bible. Study it, learn it, and then don’t ever fucking do it. Okay? Okay.
Here are a few of the highlights/lowlights:
Passive voice? Check.
Exclamation point minefields? Check.
Repeated dialogue? Check.
Circular communication? Check.
Not getting to the point? Check.
Am I making myself clear? No.
Verbose to the point that I wanted to offer up editing services? Check.
Overuse of accent and dialect? Check.
Historical? Yes.
Mystery? Possibly but it was a side car on this happy train.
Plenty of clichés? Check.
Used thought/saw and likeminded words to the point that it pulled me out of the story? Check.
Overuse of telling instead of showing? Check.
Stilted dialogue? Check.
Stilted characters? Check.
Plot twists? Possibly but I missed that particular train.
This novel made me so angry that I thought I had developed a complex. I wanted to tackle Santa Claus, throttle the Easter Bunny, and punch out the tooth fairy. And I had this absolute darkness lingering over me like a rain cloud. On the bright side, I came up with a character that will have a mother lode of shit dumped on his head, as I explore the depths of darkness ordinary individuals can sometimes face. If not for this particular book, this wouldn’t have been possible.
Oh, and Stephen King will be pleased that at least one element of his craft was followed—there wasn’t a plethora of adverbs.
I literally wanted to pound the shit out of NORTH SEA REQUIEM with a hacksaw, hammer, battering ram, and a flack vest. And then pick it back up and do it all over again.
Curtain calls and fancy halls and soccer balls and…you may finish this sentence however you like.
I received this book for free through NetGalley.