Review: Surprisingly twisted tale
Rating: 3 out of 5
Date: 04 12, 2012
This is one time where I really wish Amazon allowed half stars.  This book deserves a higher rating than three stars.  The author took a risky path and managed to keep the plot together.Sadly, while I believe its better than a three star book, I just don't feel that it is worthy of 4 stars.  In the end I found myself calling it just under 3.5 and rounding down.  If half stars were allowed, this would have been easy to rate at 3.5 stars.The story itself was almost Lovecraftian in its complexity and nature.  Saying much more than that might give away too much, but I was definitely impressed with the imagination and thought that went into creating the small universe the main character found himself in.But that allow opened up the story for some flaws.  One is something that Lovecraft himself appeared to understand.  Any story requires that you be able to suspend your disbelief and follow along hte plot.  Lovercraft usually worked around this by having the point of view character be someone that the reader would have an instinctive level of trust with.  Most of his narrative characters were officials or reporters.  IN Catch a Succubus the narrative character is a 17 year old boy who from the beginnning has others pointing out that he's had a history of daydreaming.  He just doesn't quite bring the authoritive view that makes it easy to slide into the story.  THe sad thing is that, the plot requires that he be that age.  It was definitely a challenge for the author, and while he managed it well, it didn't quite sell the story.The other area the story suffered from was in character development.  Many of Lovecraft's stories appeared to have a specific ending he wrote for, and character development was secondary.  Like Lovecraft, the author here seemed to have predetermined the ending, so the whole story flowed down a set path.  Many of the characters don't get much time on the page and appear mostly to help push the main character down the plot path towards the ending.  It's a good and well thought out plot, but I wanted a bit more character.  When the final scene comes, the punch was lacking.This is a very good imaginative writer, who came up with an interesting idea for a plot and managed to write an engaging story.  My complaints should not be taken as condeming the book.  I definitely recommend it to anyone seeking something different.I do warn that on my Kindle Touch there were a few page format issues, where extra line breaks appeared, and for grammar and spelling purists there was a couple of minor issues, but overall the story is well presented.