Review: Mr. Arsenault, Are Your Characters Mute?
Rating: 3 out of 5
Date: 01 21, 2014
This was not the worst indie sci-fi I've ever read, by any means, but it did seem rather soulless, and it took me a while to figure out why.The plot was reasonably sound: several friends go on a camping trip in the wilds of northern California, and while there they discover that aliens have invaded the beautiful landscape.Were there spelling issues? A few, but nowhere near the frequency that I have been witness to before.The sentence structure was a little amateurish in places, but overall not that bad.Yet the book seems to go on and on endlessly until the final resolution, and after reading about a quarter of the way, it dawned on me: there is not a word of dialogue. The entire book is a first person narrative, almost a diary, of the protagonist's experiences.Does that make it bad? Not necessarily, but it does seem tedious. Some spoken dialogue between the characters would go a long way to relieving that.Interestingly, despite all that, the most interesting part of the book, to me, was the preview of the sequel, enough so that I bought it and am starting it now. So whatever the author's strategy, I guess it worked.