Review: Very flawed, needs editing, characters flat
Rating: 1 out of 5
Date: 01 26, 2014
Buried Secrets had potential, but the execution is flawed, and overall, the story is pretty `meh'. There's an introduction at the start, "About Buried Secrets" which intends to give us some back story, but which serves to almost immediately deny the reader any fear they might've felt while reading.The story is fairly typical, a little unoriginal. Couple moves into new home (which is actually a very old home), weird stuff starts to happen, and instead of acting like any normal person would, they still continue to live in the house, and pretend nothing is happening for a while. Why Hollywood and authors tend to think that if someone crawled on your sheets at night, you wouldn't freak out and get the hell out of there, is beyond me. But apparently that's not the way this works. Ignorance is bliss.The story is written in a weird font, like it was written with an old typewriter. At least that's how it looks on my .pdf. Didn't like it all, but okay, I'm willing to look beyond that.The dialogue is awkward and stiff, and there's not enough detail about any of the characters to truly care about them. Instead of saying "can't" and "it's", the author tends to say "cannot" and "it has". Even in dialogue. This sounded unnecessarily stiff and formal. Examples:"I cannot wait for Kevin to enjoy it, too.""It has been the longest day, babe."I have the feeling this story is the author's first attempt to write a story. It's not all bad. The plot could be interesting, but the writing needs a lot of work. There's a reason why they say you shouldn't publish your first book or story, no matter how good you think it is. I'm not sure the author hired an editor, but if he did, that editor should've told him the book needed work.The characters are flat. They have no personality. Even in short stories, you should at least make us care about the characters. The story jumps from point a to b without much explanation. Some scenes are irrelevant, others that should be relevant, are simply skipped.Overall, I'd lie if I say I enjoyed the story. It had potential, but misses every ball. With a good editor, another round of revisions, and some polishing, it could become interesting though.I received this book for free in exchange for an honest review.