Review: Poorly written creepy thriller with a Stepford twist
Rating: 1 out of 5
Date: 01 15, 2014
British couple Michael and Emily Torrance move to an idyllic gated Mayberry-themed town called Eden, an improbable oasis in the American Southwest. But nothing is as it seems. Story itself is fantastical--a tale cribbed from Stephen King thriller meets Stepford Wives with a little Rosemary's Baby sprinkled in for seasoning. By the time I got to the end of the story, I felt duped.Technically, the writing is a dog's breakfast of poor sentence structure, garbled grammatical conundrums, and repetitious words. Matt Drabble seems to be writing in phonetic English: he uses "would of" when he should have written "would've." Other reviewers mentioned his use of: "for all intensive purposes" instead of  "for all intents and purposes." My ESL friend would dub Drabble's rabble as being functionally literate, and nothing more.Most irksome is that Drabble is so out of touch with the language across the pond, that he had American characters speaking in UK English idioms. I'm sorry, but we Yanks just don't say "jumpers" for sweaters (an idiom lost in translation), or "torch" for flashlight, or "lorry" for truck. It's one thing to have the narrator of the story speaking in British idioms, but the quoted dialogue of American characters should convey the language of the country it represents.I agree with the reviewer who wrote that this book is in need of serious editing, I don't think it was edited, ever. Another reviewer didn't mind the typos, because he liked the story. A third reviewer wrote: "Who does the editing, keyboarding, punctuation, and proofing for these ebooks, anyway? I am tired of having to decipher text." For those of us with dyslexia, those pesky typos and errors are not just distracting, they throw us out of the story. Sort of like tossing the baby out with the bathwater.Minus one star.