I think I would have loved this if it had been a short story. As a full length story, it bored me. Mr. James knew a lot of words. He wanted to make sure readers to knew this. He made sure he used every adverb and adjective he could think of. And Holy Prepositional phrases, Batman! There were single sentences that could have easily been their own paragraphs. There were times I had to reread sections two or three times to actually figure out what was going on. Then there were the characters. They were just too over the top right from the start for me. I like to get to know the characters and their quirks as a story progresses. I like to see madness slowly grow ( Shirley Jackson's The Haunting of Hill House is the perfect example of this). Here, as each character was introduce, we were told almost everything about them. What you weren't told you could figure out within their first few sentences of them speaking.

This was not a good first impression of the author for me. His writing was too pretentious. I will still try at least one of his other titles. However, if the writing style is the same, I see them being DNFs.

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