A private investigator paranormal fantasy that fell flat for me.
Genre: Fantasy, Mystery
No. of pages: 279
If you can keep your cool when everyone else is losing theirs…maybe you don’t realize how bad the situation is.
Rekhmire the Destroyer wants to annihilate the world (that’s what destroyers do) and he isn’t going to stop until he’s achieved his stretch goal of making everyone a part of his undead army.
Not on my watch. It’s time to send this walking piece of leather back to the tomb he crawled out of. But how am I supposed to do that when he’s immune to all magic and weapons?
A Harbinger’s gotta do what a Harbinger’s gotta do.
I’m a massive fan of this series, but I’m not seeing growth with the writing and character development.
All the side characters are simply props to drive the plot forward. There is no complexity, no personality, no conflict, no consequences. They just run about doing Alec’s bidding as soon as he barks an order. It was so boring.
Magic is used a lot in ‘Grave Night’ again without consequence – bucking the trend of the previous books in the series where there was always a cost for dabbling in the occult.
This book was so flat I was a little angry – I’ve invested a lot in this series, and been hoping to see some improvement in character, writing style, grammar, but there was none to see.
There is so much repetition. Repeated words, phrases, and situations… as a writer it’s so lazy. Think of a different approach to convey the same information – that’s what makes writing interesting and compels a reader to stay engaged. This book read like a first draft… all the ideas were there, the structure, but the soul, tone, and elegance had yet to be added. The worst example of Tell instead of Show I’ve ever read.
Like I’ve always capitulated about the Harbinger series, the ideas and takes on the supernatural are unique and fun. I didn’t feel that so much with ‘Grave Night.’ It lacked the usual zing – which left the other failings apparently obvious.
The characters aren’t re-introduced to the reader. With so much time since the last publication there was no sufficient memory jog for the characters – it’s like Wright picked up in the middle of the conversation and I had to scramble to remember past events and the characters relationships to the relevant scene… and gained no strong emotional bond, no development, all the characters were lifeless and flat like the zombie protagonist.
I also hate to say, but this instalment has the worst dialogue of the series. I’d been expecting the delayed release meant Wright was editing the manuscript, making ‘Grave Night’ better, but all evidence points to another rushed-to-publication effort that is having me lose faith in this series, this author, and self-published books in general.
I’d not recommend this at all except you will need the plot points if you wish to continue with the series. You could read the first chapter, and then the last and you’d pretty much have the book summed up effectively.
Overall feeling: *SMH*
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Casey Carlisle 