A Shot in the Light: parts I-IV (a book review post)

You can find my review for part one, "A Flock of Ill Omens," here.
You can find my review for part two, "In Short Supply," here.
I had intended to review parts three and four separately, but, before I got finished with part three, the individual parts became unavailable, so I'll be reviewing the first collection with a focus on parts three and four, since I haven't talked about them, yet.

The first thing I want to note is that the editing fell into a sinkhole or something somewhere between parts two and three. I believe that I noted in my review of part one that it was pretty clean but, by part three, it was like having the maid who doesn't do windows. In other words, the grammar and punctuation errors started getting in my way of seeing the view. Now, I will admit, editing issues stand out more to me the less I'm enjoying something or, to put it another way, I more easily overlook those kinds of copy-editing issues when the story is compelling. There was nothing here by part three to keep me from noticing every single error, some of them the kind of errors that shouldn't have existed to begin with. Example: Periods and commas NEVER fall on the outside of a quotation mark. If you look above to the links I've included, you can see that the commas, even though they are not part of the titles, are within the quotes. That's the proper way to do it. That should be a simple thing, and the increasing volume of people punctuating only outside of quotation marks is becoming troubling, and it's not something I expect to find in the work of an experienced author.

The other thing that was tiresome was the overuse of the past perfect and past perfect continuous verb tenses. I'm not sure exactly when this started happening, but I started noticing it in part three. The chapters started beginning with these elaborate thought flashbacks of everything that had been happening to the character since the last time we'd seen that character. For instance:

He'd left the apartment before everybody got up, deciding there was no better time to get the lay of the land. He'd started with Fort McPherson, an Army base he'd been to for Special Forces training twice upon a time, so the sense of familiarity had given him an advantage when he went to see what was going on.... Once he'd made his way onto the grounds, he'd stood in the trees to watch for a long time.

That goes on for almost that entire chapter, telling us everything very passively after the fact. This is the very definition of "telling" and not showing. There's no tension, because we know everything already happened from the character's perspective and he's just thinking through it all. Not to mention that passive storytelling just grows boring after a while.

 And I'm not even going to mention the fact that "army" and "special forces" shouldn't be capitalized. Oh, wait...

Now, I'm going to jump back to an issue I mentioned in part one, because it comes up again part three: the use of bug bombs to sterilize living environments. It bothered me when it was done in part one because, really? I mean, don't you think that if we could use bug bombs to kill viruses on open surfaces that we would be using bug bombs to kill viruses? By "we," I mean hospitals and health care people. For all I know, there are "normal" people out there who do use bug bombs in this way, and I bet they wonder why they still get sick. But I digress. After it happened in part one, it was possible that it was a misconception of the specific character; I didn't believe that, but it was possible. In part three, some other character wants to do the same thing, so it became apparent that it was an author issue as it seems to be common knowledge among all of the characters (who are all supposed to be intelligent and accomplished). This kind of research flub really bothers me.

And it's not the only one.

Also back in part one, one of the characters finds an office complex full of people who died from the flu. It was like they all got sick at once and died before any of them could get home. Or to a hospital. Or anything. This is after the author has already shown us other people with the flu being sick for long periods before succumbing, so I didn't understand why would have this building full of dead people. But I reserved judgement on that in case there was something else going on. However, by part three, finding office complexes full of dead people has become kind of normal, and it makes me wonder, again, if the author did any research beyond watching The Walking Dead. People don't get the flu and drop dead from it a few hours later. Employers don't keep people at work who are puking and running high fevers. This idea that there would be whole office complexes of people who died because they got too sick to leave is just.. wrong. Poison gas, maybe, but not any kind of disease. Biology just doesn't work that way.

On top of the scientific inaccuracies, one of the main ways the author moves the plot forward is by having the (supposedly intelligent) characters repeatedly doing stupid things. Like sneaking out alone. In fact, in part four, every main character but one sneaks off alone at some point and, each time, something bad happens. It became too much for me and, again, made me think of shows like The Walking Dead and Breaking Bad where stupidity is substituted in for personality so that the author(s) can move the plot forward. That was actually the breaking point for me, that all of these characters kept doing this stuff. Actually, it was all because of one character: Sydney. She sneaks out after someone else who has sneaked out, and she has no good reason to do it. The author prompted her by giving her a "bad feeling," but it was so that she would be there to rescue Theo when the bad stuff started happening. Sorry (not sorry), but I hate contrived plot points.

Honestly, it was a struggle for me to get through part four of A Shot in the Light. I only did it because I had previously stated that I would give it through part four. All of the issues with the story that I mentioned in my first two reviews are still present along with the issues that have been added in. So that's it for me. I won't be continuing to the next part or collection or whatever is next.

I will point out again, though, that the writing is fast-paced and there's a lot going on in the story. For most people, the grammar/punctuation issues are not going to be a problem. And, maybe, details like the bug bombs won't be an issue for most people, too. Based on the other reviews for "A Flock of Ill Omens," I have to assume that that is so. I do have a mild curiosity as to what is going on "big picture" in the book, but it's not enough to prompt me to struggle through the rest of the series.

In Short Supply (a book review post)

You can see my review of part one of A Shot in the Light here.
There will be some slight spoilery-ness since this is a review of part two, but it's not going to be significant spoilery-ness. In other words, I don't think it's going to hurt anything for you to know any of what I might say in this review.
Also, I have no idea what the cover of this part has to do with this part of the story. As far as I can tell, there is no relevance. Unless I've forgotten something, but I don't think I have. Maybe I just don't understand what the picture is.

Okay, so we find out pretty much right away that there is some kind of conspiracy going on. That there is a conspiracy both helps the story and hurts it. Well, at this point, it hurts it, because it raises the "How the heck do you contrive a conspiracy to spread a deadly flu around and expect that work out?" question. Maybe, down the line, there will be an answer to that, but everything so far undermines the story's plausibility. Still, there are eight parts to go, and people do do incredibly stupid things, so I'm willing to go with that. For the moment. That there is a conspiracy helps in that it makes sense out of a few things from "A Flock of Ill Omens."

However, there is an issue from part one that carries over into this one, and it's something I have to talk about, especially in light of the current Ebola crisis. One of the things that is so far pushing the plot of A Shot in the Light (and, granted, this is only part two) is the lack of information to people. This bothered me in part one, but it's even worse in part two. There are repeated statements in the book about how there is no news getting out about how bad the flu epidemic is and how many people are dying from it (and even just in part two it's a considerable amount). The central characters (two of which are reporters) are having to do all of the research themselves. One of them even says something to the effect of how no one else in the world but her has the information that she has.

The problem, though, is that these characters in the book do almost all of their research online. Yeah, I said they are using the Internet to find all this stuff out, but the presentation is as if these people are the only ones with the skills to do this, so no one else knows what's really going on, and no one is reporting on this stuff. That includes the reporters, by the way. People are in the dark except for how things are immediately affecting them.

I just can't buy into this idea at all. It seems to me to go beyond just implausible to downright impossible. I mean, personally, I get all of my news online. All of it. Because that's what happens when you don't have TV. Okay, actually, I get some very minor parts from the radio when I'm in the car, but I don't spend a huge amount of time driving, so it is just a small portion and usually along the lines of getting the headlines, which I later read about online if I hadn't already seen it. I am not at all unique in getting the vastness of my news from the Internet, so the idea that the populace of the United States is ignorant of the extent of this flu virus in the book because there is no news of it is beyond what I can buy into. And, heck, with what we've seen of the coverage of Ebola in the US, it just heightens to me what a weak plot ploy this is.

Okay, yes, there's a conspiracy. But no conspiracy is enough to stop all the free roaming people of the Internet to talk about things. People would know what's going on.

Also, I continue to be bothered by how all of the characters have the same mannerisms. Although there are many point-of-view characters, it's like reading from the POV of the same character all the time. Even the military guy acts just like all of the women. Everything is all business all the time in the same crisp, efficient pattern. And that more than one character has thoughts of how everything is like being a spy just heightens that none of the characters have distinctive personalities.

The writing is fast paced, though, and, because of the Ebola issue, I'm interested to see where the author takes it, so I plan to keep reading. I'll read at least through part four and see how I feel at that point.

A Flock of Ill Omens (a book review post)

"A Flock of Ill Omens" is the first part of the 10-part serial release of A Shot in the Light. If you decide you want to try it, you should pick up the compilation of the first four parts of the series because it's the same price as part one all by itself.

Having done a serially released book myself, I have a soft spot for the idea of serials. I think they have a lot of potential. As a first part of a serial, I think this does its job adequately. In that, I mean it draws in the reader and makes him want to know what's going on. As in me.

However, with me, that's not all a positive. There are some things I just have questions about. Technical questions. As in, "Is this part of the story or did the author fail to do adequate research?" So, basically, I'm holding my breath and waiting to find out. It would be normal for things to not make sense at this stage in the book, so I'm reserving judgement on the things that have caused questions for me.

Oh, except for one thing, because I'm pretty sure it was a one-off. At one point, one of the characters wants to decontaminate a house. He's afraid of a bio-hazard (which could just be a flu virus), and he's trying to eliminate it. He opts to buy a bug bomb, the kind you can buy at the grocery store, under the assumption that it will kill all living things in the house, including viruses. Um... That's not how bug bombs work, and the character should have known that, considering his profession. I get that the bug bomb made for a convenient way to "zap" the house, but unless they've started making some that actually irradiate their immediate environment, a bug bomb's not going to do more than get rid of some roaches and fleas. Maybe a mouse or two. Maybe.

The writing is pretty fast paced, possibly a little faster paced than I'm actually comfortable with. Things frequently felt rushed to me while at the same time having no actual results. I think that's probably in line with current conventions, though, so most people will probably feel very comfortable with the pacing. What I'm saying is that the writing style is probably a plus in a general sense. It wasn't a negative for me, but it also didn't do anything for me.

And, because it's me, the editing:
The editing was pretty good. Mostly, there aren't any issues. Except for the one that is my current pet peeve: the misuse of dashes. I've talked about dashes before, so I'm not going to go into a whole rant about them other than to say that I wish people would actually learn what dashes are for rather than using them by feel. But, then, when you have someone like L'Engle using them to start paragraphs, I suppose it's understandable that there would be confusion about the purpose of dashes as punctuation. [Just to point it out, starting a paragraph with an m-dash is like throwing your commas at the beginning of your sentences. It's just wrong.] Anyway, other than the dash-abuse, and that wasn't rampant like I've seen in some books, the editing is pretty tight. Definitely well above average for a self-published book.

I already have part two set up on my Kindle, so, see, I'm still reading. However, considering that I'm also still reading L'Engle's time books, I don't know if that actually says anything significant. But these are way better than those. I mean, I'm willingly going to read part two, not out of some weird obligation to finish like I have with the Time Quintet. For the moment, though, I'm giving this a C rather like I did with The Skin Map, because I need to see where it's going and what's going on before I can make a better judgement than that. If it hadn't been for the bug bomb thing, though, I might have gone with a B.