Review: Ghoulishly Entertaining, But Riddled with Dozens of Punctuation Errors
Rating: 4 out of 5
Date: 12 8, 2012
As a reviewer, reading The Fall of Society Book 1 by Thonas Rand is a nightmare.  The first reason is the genre: how Earth's population falls prey to an undead infection that turns live human beings into mindless, hungry undead zombies.  The second reason is more problematic.  From reading his debut work, Star Light book 1, I am well aware of the fact that the author is grammatically challenged in his writing, and needs the assistance of good editors for his works.  When I first started reading The Fall of Society, I find myself encountering punctuation errors.  The author has a propensity to mix commas, periods, and semicolons, and also to write run-on sentences.  Thereupon, I decided to bookmark every location where I come across a grammatical error.  The result is horrific: one hundred thirty one bookmarks.  Some locations have multiple errors: two, three, even four.  So in reality, I came across somewhere between one hundred forty and one hundred fifty errors.  This is simply unacceptable.  Shortly after I started reading, and I kept coming across page after page of errors, I asked the author who edited his book.  The answer?  "Craiglist."  Ouch.  On the one hand, I am sympathetic to an indie author, who does not necessarily have the resources to have a book properly edited.  On the flip side, it is a disservice to the readership to read a book that is clearly so poorly edited.  If I was the person hired off Craiglist to edit The Fall of Society, I would be EMBARRASSED to submit back to the author such a haphazardly edited manuscript.The Fall of Society is not truly a book in the traditional sense, with one overall storyline and a defined set of characters.  Instead, it is a loosely connected set of short stories and scenarios that show human beings desperately seeking to survive to see the next day.  Thonas Rand is clearly a fan of the undead zombie genre, and delights in writing poetic prose that glorify the dead and the dying.The author approaches each scene in a manner similar to Quentin Tarantino.  Like the way the famous director spent a lot of film on Uma Thurman's ugly toes in the first Kill Bill movie, the author starts building a scene by focusing on something innocuous, plain and ordinary.  Thonas Rand slowly adds more details to the scene, piece by piece.  The process reminds me of the way the actor portraying Mozart in the film Amadeus writes music.  The result is a beautiful masterpiece, where the humans are mere puppets that decorate the elaborate setting the author has carefully set in place.  In The Fall of Society, Thonas Rand truly shows his mastery of the undead zombie genre.However, Thonas Rand's bright and glorious literary star is marred and severely diminished by his inability to write a grammatically proper novel.  It is truly disheartening to me, as a reviewer, because this situation is the equivalent of watching an amateur boxer with world class talent being unable to make his weight class because the guy can't stop eating and keep the weight off.  The grammatical issues are very correctable, but the author's cavalier attitude in allowing a clearly poorly edited book to be published in this manner is unacceptable.  At a time when an indie author (The Edge of Never by J.A. Redmerski) has captured the top slot on Amazon Kindle's Bestseller list, I firmly believe Thonas Rand has the literary talent to make the top 100 bestseller list, if only he would take editing of his work seriously and accept no less than a perfect edited manuscript.  On that note, I am boycotting Thonas Rand's books; I refuse to read and review his future books until he commits himself to publishing properly edited books (which I define as containing no more than a dozen grammatical errors).The Fall of Society book 1 by Thonas Rand is rated four stars: five for content, with one star deducted for editing.