Hermit
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Re:virus: Fwd: FREE BEST SELLING ATHEIST NOVEL
« Reply #1 on: 2006-10-16 05:46:44 » |
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*Review*
IN BED WITH GOD AND THE DEVIL eBook (Charles Sabillon)
Dear Lucifer & Friends
Best selling? Who is this author selling to? Or is there a catch? Has he sold one copy (to his girlfriend) at the cover price, making it the best selling, exorbitantly priced, badly written book by an unknown author, tossing a pot of pixels into the face of a gullible public, of all time? Is the author peddling his work to atheists only because Christians did not want to buy it? As this review will show, these questions, and their answers, are important.
The "free" book above, is free for only 149 out of 296 pages. I discovered this after I reached page 149 and went and checked to see why the PDF I had downloaded was broken. It was, but it seems, like the author's promise implied by offering the work "free," that this is deliberate. Certainly, the work is only 50% free, unless you habitually read only the first halves of books. "Fifty percent free" would not usually qualify in my mind as congruent with, or even sufficiently similar to "free", to describe it as "free". Not even an accountant plagued by rounding errors would do so, unless it were indisputibly in his interest. Indeed, to me this qualifies only as "extremely annoying". I could not care if unknown authors who cannot find others to advocate their work choose to use the "free chapter" - or, as in this instance, more, as a teaser to showcase their work. This is an effective and appreciated technique to introduce their capabilities and publicize their work appropriately and simultaneously; but to do so with a false "free" label is a deception worthy of a shifty eyed Christian.
As far as the sample went, my opinion is that it reads somewhat like a poor clone of Piers Anthony's "Incarnations" series, written by somebody altogether more pretentious, who sometimes uses the wrong $2.00 words when the right $0.02 words are much easier to hand. Further, unlike Piers Anthony, this author clearly does not have a desperately needed editor of any level of competence (even if the editor had obtained all his English by reading Pakistan newspapers, I'm sure that such an editor could still be guaranteed to do better than this particular author). As I read this ongoing saga of unfortunate events I kept finding myself wondering whether, if perhaps, possibly, somewhere in the author's youth, he was taught that a word should never be repeated without putting a reasonable amount of distance between the instances; and the author, lacking any of the other methods used by the articulate, or even a modicum of talent, simply over-thumbed an on-line thesaurus.
This is one of the very rare books which, having started, I am not going to complete. Not because of its failings (which, in honesty are many), not because of the clumsy attempt to disguise the paucity of reflection and character development with a stream of somewhat repetitive activity, not even because I don't understand why the subject, "atheist goes to hell and meets devil, then struggles to get to heaven and .... buy part II to continue," which is not original, (and I have enjoyed its predecessors in a light hearted fashion) especially qualifies the book for an atheist audience, but simply, I won't be completing it because there is no chance in *hell* that I am going to buy some poorly written fantasy, in paperback form, for $20. Should a copy fall into my hands, I would finish it, but it would not be for the deathless quality of the prose (there seems to be a shortage in that department), nor for the ideas expressed (paucity here too), which seem to be on a par with John Bunyan's somewhat earlier piece on the same lines, "The Pilgrim's Progress, from this world to that which is to come, delivered under the similitude of a dream," which contained a wealth of original ideas when first published, is much better written, was much better selling, and is currently free, but merely because I was inculcated somewhere along the line with the idea that the sunk investment of time in part I of a book can only be redeemed to some extent by finishing the book, however atrocious, rather than through simply dumping it.
Perhaps, rather than the contents, even the shifty eyed believers found this exorbitant price tag a sufficiently compelling reason not to waste their blunt on this book. For those who value honesty - or their time - above rubies and pearls, it seems to me that even at a 50% discount, the generous 3/10 I would award this book is still not sufficiently persuasive to recommend that it be inflicted upon others.
Hermit
PS I think that this may be the worst panning I've ever offered to a book. I also suspect that, like the 'generous' 3/10 it earned, the panning is well deserved.
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