Review: Needs quite a bit of polish.
Rating: 2 out of 5
Date: 10 30, 2013
Conversation started October 16Luke Green10/16, 9:26amLuke GreenUndead Valleys has some points of interest. The degeneration of infected berserkers into more traditional shambling zombies is not something I've seen done before. The plot framework is solid with events proceeding in a logical fashion. There are a few clever bits here and there and the author has incorporated much of his own life into the tale and it is clear that he is discussing things which are important to him.Unfortunately, the strong points of the book are buried under a vast need for editing. There are missing commas, run-on sentences, typos, missing words and mistaken words all throughout the book. I expect such mistakes. I find them all the time in professionally edited, traditionally printed material. However, in most of the books I've read these mistakes are occasional and can usually be counted on one hand. The mistakes in this book are pervasive. Every page is filled with grammar errors and each one is draining away the emotion that the author seeks to convey.Unity is also an issue in the book. There are several places where the topic changes within a paragraph, forcing the reader to slow down and spend extra time processing what was said and work out which fragments belonged to which topic. There are points where the dialogue of two separate characters occurs within the same paragraph. This makes it rather difficult to parse out who is talking to whom at any given moment.The lack of unity combined with the numerous grammar errors makes for a distinct lack of coherence. When I say that, I am talking about literary or linguistic coherence: the element which causes a written work to hold together. Despite the fact that the events of the story and each of the details within those events are easy to identify, the story itself is rather a bit of a ramble.Research is another area lacking. The author seems to have done little to no research in the way genetics and biology work. This wouldn't be so terrible if he had taken the normal dodge of being rather vague about the particulars of the contagion and the cure. Even this might probably have been a non-issue if the grammar and unity of the book were stronger. As it was, I had to read it analytically rather than for pleasure and the science mistakes were fairly obvious. Again, however, a good book can survive science mistakes. For that matter, good books sometimes deliberately ignore science even in a story that is considered a more mainstream genre. The grammar errors discussed above, however, make these mistakes more obvious than they should be.The final one is believability. While an apocalypse situation can believably result in a civilian leading military forces, a plot development which has been successfully done several times before, the development is not carried out well here. In the main character's first mission, he is given the lead despite his reputation for being a drunk due simply to the fact that he's a local. Add to that, he, as a civilian with limited prior experience, lectures the military personnel under him, who have combat experience against the zombies, about the best way to deal with zombies based on what he had read in the paper. This is probably the most damning mistake on this line, since it is behavior that lacks textual support and thus undermines the rather more acceptable path of development as it comes later on. The next major mistake is in giving the character a rank later on. Corporal especially was a poor choice as that's a rather low rank and not one that would be put in command of anything.The language of the book in general sounds primarily American in nature and I had to check to see that the author did, indeed, live in Wales. Most of the characters have bland sort of Standard American English way of speech, the kind no one really speaks outside of news broadcasts. That speech is peppered with the occasional slang to give them a semblance of an accent, however, most of the slang is rather more American than British. As such the implied accent is more American than British or Welsh. The one character who has strong English elements to their speech, General Lazenby, strikes me as more of a caricature of the English dialect than an actual example of it. There is the possibility however, the impression of an American accent is one coming from me, since I am an American. In which case, the language is so bland and non-specific that I'm simply imprinting my own accent on it.This brings us to the character of Rico, who sprinkles Spanish throughout his speech in a manner common to Mexican-Americans. This would be less of a problem if the character were Mexican-American, but he's British born and raised. He should sound British and if he was using terms like "ese" or "loco" or the like, then it would likely sound artificial and fake. This is made worse by dialogue coming from him discussing his culture. The first instance was eye-catching and not in a good way. Catholicism is not unknown in Britain, and the prohibition against suicide would be equally well known. Rico shouldn't have to comment that his culture specifically looks down on it. A sign of the cross would have been good enough, actually.The "ethnic superstitions" line is simply debasing. We don't call our own culture prohibitions against the number 13, black cats, breaking mirrors and other such things "ethnic superstitions." Why would a Hispanic refer to his own culture's quirks as "ethnic superstitions?" The author could just as easily remove the word "ethnic" and it would be fine. "Superstition" and "ethnic" are both loaded words. Superstition implies a primitive understanding of things and a degree of ignorance. Ethnic scientifically denotes as something related to ethnicity, but it con-notates as being related to a minority population. Pairing ethnic with superstition causes it to lean toward the improper connotative meaning rather than the more scientific usage of the word. Spoken by a member of the ethnic group being referred to, it comes across as a tacit admission of inferiority and primitive nature.That's the summary. For the most part, the story breaks down on mechanics and conventions rather than plot, however, there are notable flaws in pacing, plot and character development that grow out of those break downs. As a whole, I can't give this story more than two stars as it currently stands. I do hope that the author can find the time to have the story placed in the hands of an editor and get some help correcting these flaws. If he manages so, this could be a decently interesting story.