Trevor James Zaple

I don't normally pick up self-published books, but this one fell into my hands and I thought, what the hell, why not. Ignore the summary on goodreads, it's really not as long-winded or boring as that block of description might suggest.

In an inexplicable phenomena they start calling the Disappearance, people disappear - leaving the world in a state of confusion and mild chaos. The story revolves around a few key characters and follows their lives in the aftermath.

I think it's a pretty decent story with a couple of key flaws that I can't ignore.
The story opens with a typical introduction of the characters. You meet Jason, an internet troll and bored, jobless boy-man living at his parent's house. Even in the first few paragraphs you can get a feel for the tone of the book. Heavily influenced by internet slang and internet culture, a lot of casual sex without clear plot purpose, a very male dominated perspective, and fairly good characterization.

I can roll with the internet slang and internet culture, and then I start getting to know Jason and Sarah, the plot premise occurs... and then we start hitting problems. We are quickly thrown into a flurry of snapshots of the world through different perspectives.

We learn 13 different characters names and their background within 30 pages. That is just madness, especially because the reader has no way of knowing which ones are important (and since they all have backgrounds and personal names, I assumed they all might be important later on). And let me just spoil a little for you - most of them are not important. !! Yeah, I got a little frustrated. Personally, I'm thinking that the author was trying to take a leaf from World War Z (the novel of course) and show the progression of the "apocalypse" through different views. Unfortunately I don't think it works because each vignette is a brief paragraph and then most of the characters are discarded.

Another major issue I had with the book is that there is a severe perspective problem. We jump from one character's point of view to another's within the span of a single paragraph. It's really odd, it really is. Why am I reading about Jason's thoughts on this political speech of taking care of the city and then oh here's Mark's thoughts too! There's no clear demarcation between changes in perspective and that really bugs me. And then occasionally there are brief "interludes" where a third person omniscient narrator-like voice comments on the overall scene of what is happening. See? I have this inkling feeling that the author is confusing this novel with a movie or something with quick shifts in POV and voice-overs.

I have a couple of other peeves about this book. Like the excessive amounts of sex that don't really add anything to the plot or character development. And the sex isn't even gratuitous or sexy, it feels like it's just put in because, I dunno, guys think about sex a lot?
Or the way the book only has male perspectives and despite the number of female characters, they all fall heavily to the wayside (or make their appearance during lustful thoughts from the males).
Or how the book focuses heavily on politics for a good portion of the book, but doesn't exactly matter for the first 100 or so pages.

But the biggest flaws that caused me to severely lose interest in the book midway is the lack of direction and the lack of plot. I got really mad around page 100 because there was literally no reason for me to keep reading except to see how these characters survived another day. And I didn't love them enough for that. There was no goal or purpose and way to survive this entire phenomena for ONE HUNDRED PAGES. That's half the book, people! Okay, there were really minor day-to-day survival problems to solve, but no overarching book goal. So page 100. That's where I started to skip and skim to see if there was any hope for the latter half of the book. And then finally, the mention of depletion of the food supplies, mentioned in the summary. I can't believe it, it takes half the book to even get to the main plot problem written about in the summary? And it's not that convincing of a plot. In some strange way, it almost felt like that plot was contrived in order for characters to interact more.

That is my conclusion for this book: It never was about the plot, the book was trying to be about the characters.

So, I just wrote about all the flaws for most of this review. But I swear, I could have loved this book if it had a little more plot, a little more structure. I did like it quite a bit, until the lack-of-plot realization. The writing is actually quite good. I guess I should say that Zaple's greatest strength is probably creating unique characters and crafting fairly realistic scenes. Emotions are written well, dialogue is strong, action is well-written. Most of the book was enjoyable because I did want to see how things would progress. There are a lot of strengths in this book, despite some major flaws.

2.5 stars, rounded down because I had to skip/skim through so much of the middle portion.
Recommended for those who enjoyed something like World War Z. And I guess recommended for those who can tolerate perspective jumps and character development over plot. If you could choose, I'd probably would also recommend you be male to enjoy this book a little more.… (mehr)

I don't normally pick up self-published books, but this one fell into my hands and I thought, what the hell, why not. Ignore the summary on goodreads, it's really not as long-winded or boring as that block of description might suggest.

In an inexplicable phenomena they start calling the Disappearance, people disappear - leaving the world in a state of confusion and mild chaos. The story revolves around a few key characters and follows their lives in the aftermath.

I think it's a pretty decent story with a couple of key flaws that I can't ignore.
The story opens with a typical introduction of the characters. You meet Jason, an internet troll and bored, jobless boy-man living at his parent's house. Even in the first few paragraphs you can get a feel for the tone of the book. Heavily influenced by internet slang and internet culture, a lot of casual sex without clear plot purpose, a very male dominated perspective, and fairly good characterization.

I can roll with the internet slang and internet culture, and then I start getting to know Jason and Sarah, the plot premise occurs... and then we start hitting problems. We are quickly thrown into a flurry of snapshots of the world through different perspectives.

We learn 13 different characters names and their background within 30 pages. That is just madness, especially because the reader has no way of knowing which ones are important (and since they all have backgrounds and personal names, I assumed they all might be important later on). And let me just spoil a little for you - most of them are not important. !! Yeah, I got a little frustrated. Personally, I'm thinking that the author was trying to take a leaf from World War Z (the novel of course) and show the progression of the "apocalypse" through different views. Unfortunately I don't think it works because each vignette is a brief paragraph and then most of the characters are discarded.

Another major issue I had with the book is that there is a severe perspective problem. We jump from one character's point of view to another's within the span of a single paragraph. It's really odd, it really is. Why am I reading about Jason's thoughts on this political speech of taking care of the city and then oh here's Mark's thoughts too! There's no clear demarcation between changes in perspective and that really bugs me. And then occasionally there are brief "interludes" where a third person omniscient narrator-like voice comments on the overall scene of what is happening. See? I have this inkling feeling that the author is confusing this novel with a movie or something with quick shifts in POV and voice-overs.

I have a couple of other peeves about this book. Like the excessive amounts of sex that don't really add anything to the plot or character development. And the sex isn't even gratuitous or sexy, it feels like it's just put in because, I dunno, guys think about sex a lot?
Or the way the book only has male perspectives and despite the number of female characters, they all fall heavily to the wayside (or make their appearance during lustful thoughts from the males).
Or how the book focuses heavily on politics for a good portion of the book, but doesn't exactly matter for the first 100 or so pages.

But the biggest flaws that caused me to severely lose interest in the book midway is the lack of direction and the lack of plot. I got really mad around page 100 because there was literally no reason for me to keep reading except to see how these characters survived another day. And I didn't love them enough for that. There was no goal or purpose and way to survive this entire phenomena for ONE HUNDRED PAGES. That's half the book, people! Okay, there were really minor day-to-day survival problems to solve, but no overarching book goal. So page 100. That's where I started to skip and skim to see if there was any hope for the latter half of the book. And then finally, the mention of depletion of the food supplies, mentioned in the summary. I can't believe it, it takes half the book to even get to the main plot problem written about in the summary? And it's not that convincing of a plot. In some strange way, it almost felt like that plot was contrived in order for characters to interact more.

That is my conclusion for this book: It never was about the plot, the book was trying to be about the characters.

So, I just wrote about all the flaws for most of this review. But I swear, I could have loved this book if it had a little more plot, a little more structure. I did like it quite a bit, until the lack-of-plot realization. The writing is actually quite good. I guess I should say that Zaple's greatest strength is probably creating unique characters and crafting fairly realistic scenes. Emotions are written well, dialogue is strong, action is well-written. Most of the book was enjoyable because I did want to see how things would progress. There are a lot of strengths in this book, despite some major flaws.

2.5 stars, rounded down because I had to skip/skim through so much of the middle portion.
Recommended for those who enjoyed something like World War Z. And I guess recommended for those who can tolerate perspective jumps and character development over plot. If you could choose, I'd probably would also recommend you be male to enjoy this book a little more.… (mehr)