What NOT to Read: The Darkness

Dear Readers, Writers, and Precious Patrons.

Today on the All Authors Friday Rewind, we take a look at a feature called What NOT to Read: The Darkness.

What NOT to Read: The Darkness

Let me be honest with you guys.

The month of February 2014 was a humdinger for crappy reads. I mean, 80% of the books that I picked up that month were pretty bad. But one! One takes the cake!

Here it goes.

"Darkness of Her Soul” by Elle Anor

Following is the blurb:

“This is a newly REVISED version of Darkness of Her Soul. All glitches have been removed, and I do apologize. A serial killer is on the loose in Pretoria, South Africa. Older lesbians are not safe in gay bars and clubs anymore. Will Captain Laura Gooding and her team be able to stop the killings? Something happens and the killer doesn't kill according to profile. The Killer kills again and vanishes into thin air. Word count:63766”

The gist of the story:

A lesbian serial killer makes it her mission to rid herself of any lesbian that resembles the woman that molested her as a child. Trapped in a life that she doesn't want, she finds an outlet, a relief of sorts, in murdering: using her feminine wiles to lure in her prey.

Suddenly, the killer disappears. She stops killing altogether. What happened to her? She fell in love.

Now as alluring as the above may sound, the execution in and of itself is simply terrible. I have nothing good to say about this read, unfortunately.

No wait! I lie! I do like 2 things about it.

1) The title

2) The cover

Yep. That's it.

So... into The Darkness I dove.

Now, before I continue with me review I'd like to note something. Per the blurb on Amazon.com, the author has revised the book and removed all mistakes, stating "All glitches have been removed, and I do apologize."

Her words, not mine.

However, if the copy that I obtained was or wasn't the revised version, I cannot say. But, if it was, then it wasn't revised very well.

I do not want to spend the entire day listing all of the things that are wrong with this read so I'll try my best to sum it up in bullets.

∙     Terrible grammar and punctuation. (SIDE NOTE: I'm not a stickler for such things, but when a book is littered with it, than I simply cannot over look it because I'm spending more time mentally correcting it, than I am enjoying the story.)

∙     Misplaced homophones. There instead of their.

∙     Dry, unemotional, one dimensional writing. There was nothing present in the writing style itself that grasped the reader and made them connect to the story.

∙     No scene separations. This can be very disturbing as it's hard to determine when one scene ends and the other beings and basically makes the story run together like a messy wet piece of paper.

∙     Too many characters at the beginning of the book. This made it hard to figure out who the main characters were. Like, I didn't know who the main characters were until the middle of the story or so.

∙     Even the saddest and happiest parts of the story, are delivered so dryly that the reader cannot grasp the intensity of what's going on.

∙     Very often I found increments of present tense mixed in with past tense.

∙     There wasn't a single page that wasn't littered with errors. Not one.

∙     Although there is adult content in the story, it feels as though a horny preteen wrote it.

∙     The ending was SO underwhelming and bland. I was honestly elated to have finished the book.

I think this about covers it. 

Ladies and gentlemen, this was bad with a capital B A D. I'm still mind blown at the fact that this book has several 4 & 5 star ratings on Amazon.com. What is this world coming to when crappy reads can be passed off as great ones?

1 start is what I gave it, however if I could have given it a zero stars on Amazon, I would have. But for here—seeing as how this is my article—zero stars!