Up From the Depths by Remo Jackson

2012-04-02T12:05:48Z

This is one of my favourite genre's - post-apocalyptic. Not having read any zombie based stories before I was wary - but I needn't have been - the premise of the story is, well, not world domination, but more, world destruction - of the human race that is.

The world's most powerful private individual who heads up a super-sized software conglomerate has a virus designed that will top the human race from destroying the world - from global warming, resource stripping etc. The way to do this is, to his mind, to remove the human race!

And off the story goes.

However - and this is the unfortunate part of this very long novel (it can't be called a story really) - it is very convoluted which makes the story very, very confusing! There are, effectively, at least three different books that use the virus as their basis, that have been re-written into one book - and this was, in this reviewers opinion, a big mistake.

One of the side-stories, based in England, apart from the contracting of the virus, has absolutely no connection with the characters, or story plots, from the rest of the novel. In fact this thread doesn't reach any conclusion by the end of the novel.

Add into this the sheer huge number of characters and I found, before I was half way through reading, that I was getting lost because I simply couldn't remember which character was which!

I corresponded with the author, Remo Jackson, about this and he confirmed that separate stories had been inter-woven into the one book. Personally, the story would benefit from being stripped back to three different different books (which I believe is being done) - it would make the whole story line not only more enjoyable to read, but open up the concept for a 'universe' to be added on to later.

Also very obvious during the 90 chapters was the differing levels of editing. For whatever reason, there are runs of chapters where the editing is excellent - very few, if any, spelling, grammar or punctuation errors. But this is then ruined with about 4 different sections where, at times, it appears the story hasn't been edited at all - words missing making sentences hard to follow, wrong words and punctuation that give completely new meaning to what has been written. Obviously the length of the novel hasn't helped here and, as I understand it, there have been numerous editors.

Remo's blog did initially state the story would be 100 chapters, but this has been shortened to 90 - which is a pity because the ending seems like it has just had the plug pulled on it - the story lines are really left up in the air - a great pity.

Finally - the author obviously has a military background - this shows very heavily throughout the story with extensive use of military acronyms and terms - unfortunately this makes reading some sections extremely difficult. Remo did tell me that many of these were explained in footnote however, as I read this from FineStories.com on a Kindle the footnotes, if present, do not come over to the Kindle at all. Remo did add a Glossary at the end of the story but even this was really too late to help with the confusion the acronyms generate when reading.

Bottom line for me - enjoyable and a good read. Yes, a few 'problems' which did, at times, detract form the book, but it is a story I would recommend to others. Hopefully, some cleaning up can be done and the whole story re-posted at some stage (along with a better ending than currently exists).

Plot: 8 | Technical Quality: 6 | Appeal to Reviewer: 9

Abby by Texrep

2010-08-04T02:45:47Z

Just a note, I felt it necessary to put my review on this story before it is complete, so I don't know the whole tale at the time of this review.

I have read stories by Texrep before. I have always found them to be of very high technical quality, with compelling characters and enjoyable stories. This story is not one of those. This one is completely beyond those. The technical quality is extremely high. I've only found two minor spelling/grammatical issues, which is fewer than I generally find in an equal amount of text in professionally published books. The characters are not just compelling, they are fully three-dimensional. As for the story, here is where I have a minor nit to pick. The story is classified as a Drama, where I would classify it as a Romance. Not in the meaning of personal, loving romance, though that certainly seems to be just down the road a bit. In this case I mean Romance in the more grand sense of the word. It is a romance of places, where the English countryside comes alive to the point that you can almost feel the breezes and smell the vegetation on the moors. It is a romance of industry, bringing to life the machines and the men who lived and died for the railroad during its height. And most of all, it is a romance of the people, making what would ordinarily be plain people with plain lives in an ordinary place come to life in a way that makes you incredibly envious of them.

It's probably a good thing that Texrep is only posting two chapters a day. I fear if he posted the whole thing at once, I would not budge for any reason until I had completed it.

Plot: 10 | Technical Quality: 10 | Appeal to Reviewer: 10

FineStories: Story Reviews

Up From the Depths by Remo Jackson

Abby by Texrep