Anyone who has spent even a few minutes on my site can probably tell that I enjoy pulp fiction. I like terror, suspense, damsels in distress, vague shambling monsters, and horrifying visions of darkness. I also like a good Victorian ghost story here and there. So when the publisher contacted me about this series, obviously I had to take a look. Here is the blurb from the author:
Launched in January of 2010, “Jason Dark” is a dime novel series in the vein of the old classic monster movies and detective stories. Playing Victorian England, it revolves around Jason Dark, a fearless and resourceful ghost hunter, that follows in the mold of Sherlock Holmes combined with Randall Garrett’s Lord D’Arcy. While using familiar themes and visuals, the story also tries to put a spin on various myths and genre stereotypes. Filled with plot twist and furious action, as well as handfuls of historic and literary references, they are somewhat sensational mysteries, just the way classic dime novels used to be… Working on a periodical release schedule, since the initial launch in January we have already released a number of new adventures…
Each adventure is 64 pages long and sells for $2.99 in a large variety of formats, such as a printed booklet, in PDF form and just about every eBook reader format in the market, including, of course, the Kindle, Nook and iPad.
I’m really bummed about these books. On one hand, they are presented as trashy dime novels right down to their pulp-style, two-column text format and their sensationalist covers. So part of me wants to turn off my brain and enjoy them. The problem is that, just because they were trashy sensationalist fiction, it doesn’t mean that the dime pulps of old were poorly written. It also doesn’t mean that that the stories in dime pulps were published unedited and were never passed under the eyes of a proofreader.
I always feel a little bad complaining about someone’s writing. I’m not a professional author, for sure. I sometimes use the word too when I mean to use the word to. I have to think about where the period goes when I’m making a parenthetical statement. I’m not sure if that apostrophe belongs in the first sentence of this paragraph. There was a time when I had a very beautiful and mysterious editor who would read all the posts on this site before they got published, but she’s up to other things these days. Like luring poor sick orphans to their dooms, or inventing new ways to use mummy bones in diabolical recipes. And who can blame her? I certainly can’t.
While they are entertaining in chosen subject matter, (I really liked the blood bath vampire orgy at the end of Theater of Vampires), the writing in the books is rather… OK I’ll say it: bad. Sentence structures are awkward. Punctuation is missing here and there. There are adverbs put to use in ways that made me sigh and groan. There are words used incorrectly. My particular favorite incorrectly used word in Theater of Vampires is quite a doozie. Here we find our heroes on their way to a hotel restaurant:
“The large driveway that led up from Regent Street was awash with warm color when Jason Dark and Siu Ling pulled up in their chaise lounge.”
A CHAISE LOUNGE
Later in the book, during a fight:
“Every muscle strain in her body tightened and wound up like a coil, ready to explode into action.”
While I enjoy the subject matter of these books, and think that the dime pulp format is interesting, the writing is impossible for me to get around. It’s certainly not as bad as this abominable past entry who also just happened to be emulating old pulps, but it’s still not good.
(LATER NOTE: The author contacted me after reading my review and has advised me that the electronic format copies of these books have been revised and they are not all full of bad language now, having been properly edited. I haven’t had the chance to read them to verify this, but figured that I would let it be known.)
Creepy Factor: 2 out of 5
Suspense Factor: 1 out of 5
Weird Erotic Tension Factor: 0 out of 5
Funny and/or Strange Factor: 1 out of 5
Stereotypical two-dimensional characters. Utter lack of eroticism. No sense of humor. Painful dialogue. Bad ’80s lingerie on the supposedly Victorian vampiress on the cover. And most of this I probably would have forgiven had the trouble been taken to edit and proofread the story.
Theater of Vampires by Guido Henkel – Thunder Peak Publishing – 2010
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