Customer Reviews

The Dark Storm (Dark Storm Novel)

5 star:		(2)
4 star:		(2)
3 star:		(2)
2 star:		(3)
1 star:		(9)

 

 

Why did I buy this book? It popped up on my recommendations list, and I was interested by the storyline. I pay attention to the reviews, but there was only one 5 star and one 1 star and the 1 starred review seemed to say it just needed tighter editing. After buying the book and getting halfway through it, I came back to make sure that any future potential readers knew how really bad it is.

Yes, it needs more editing--like starting all over again. There are four or five different points of view going on--some of which don't seem to relate to each other. Halfway through the book when the author introduce two new witches and the head warlock out of the blue, I decided that was it. We already had demons, dark lords, vampires, werewolves, holy bishops, rogue hunters, Biblical battles, zombies, and some creatures that I'm not sure what they were, all running around talking about a potential future battle and trying to kill each other. At some point in the book, I assume the author is going to bring all these storylines and characters together, but I decided I didn't care.

The shame is that if she had taken just two or three of the characters and followed their story, it might have been a good book. I'm not sure that all the blame goes to the publishing company, I think the author deserves some of the blame also.

The Dark Storm is the first of a brand new Paranormal Adventure series. I can hear you now..."Just what we need!" Now I've been pleasantly surprised by how many books in this genre I've enjoyed, particularly the ones heavy on adventure with less emphasis on romance. Unfortunately The Dark Storm is not one of them. Kris Greene uses a tried and true epic fantasy plot but transfers it to the modern world.

Gabriel is an ordinary college kid until one day he finds out he's a descendant of a long line of warriors sworn to protect the world from demonic army. A woman named De Mona Sanchez reveals all this to him and gives him a powerful ancient weapon in which to fight the demonic hordes. Ok, not much points for originality but I'll take a good re-hash over a lousy original story any day. The trouble is the Dark Storm isn't very good. The reader is deluged with plots, sub-plots, and a host of major and supporting characters--all crammed into a mere 320 pages. Greene was simply overly ambitious it seems.

There's too many ideas, too many overlapping concepts. Greene seemed to blast her entire clip hoping a few would hit their target, and very few do. As a result none of the characters are developed beyond typical stereotypes. The funny thing is that in heroic fantasy, you get almost no stand-alone novels these days...everything is a trilogy or more. But all of these urban/paranormal adventures are self-contained. They may be part of a series but they can all be read on their own. Greene has enough characters and plots for a trilogy but frankly needed an editor to rein her in a bit.

I almost never write reviews, but I could not let anyone else waste their money on what has to be worst book I have had the misfortune to read in many years. The book starts out with a mishmash of religion and mythology which was obviously written by someone with no understanding of either. The characters are cardboard, the dialogue was all but unreadable. After literally forcing myself to read page after page of this mindless drivel I finally called it quits. I wish I would have kept my receipt so I could have gotten my money back but instead I did the one thing I have rarely had cause to do, tossed it into the trash where it belongs.

I can't believe that St. Martin's has published such a dreadful book--and still more to come in the series. I've read more than 200 paranormal series, and this ranks as number 1 on my list of the worst of the lot. First, the language: The editing and copy proofing are substandard, with grammatical errors, poorly constructed sentences, and typos throughout the book. As an example of the sloppy editing, one of the villains is named Flag in this book (perhaps after Steven King's villain in "The Stand"), but gets a second "g" added to his name (Flagg) for the second book in the series ("Demon Hunt"). Greene props up her dialogue and narrative with an overpowering number of clichés. The language level of the characters swings back and forth from rough urban street slang to high-toned proper English. Second: The character development is so poor that we get a huge cast of characters with absolutely no depth. Although the author provides a detailed physical description and partial back-story for EVERY character (from the most minor to the leads), she doesn't give us any insight into their personalities. It's hard to even say that Gabriel is the main character, although the back-cover blurb and the front-cover art lead us to believe that he is supposed to be the hero. At one point we don't even hear anything about him for 36 pages, since the story constantly skips from one group of characters to another. The characters' names are a strange mix of pop culture, literature, and mythology (e.g., an elf named Gilgamesh; a demon named De Mona--after Desdemona, I guess; two characters with the surname of Redfeather--just to include Native Americans in the mix). Third: the plot: Imagine a group of piranhas attacking a big piece of meat. That's pretty much the plot, except that the "meat" is a magical trident (called the Nimrod) and the "piranhas" are a mix of humans, mages, witches, demons, goblins, sorcerers, vampires, etc., etc., etc. The fight scenes are laughable, with characters seeming to forget that they have magical powers until they are badly beaten. Then they suddenly draw themselves together and overpower their opponents. Frequently, their last-minute magical powers have heretofore never been mentioned--they just appear. This happens time and time again. One of the mainstays of UF fiction is the angst, but that, too, is totally missing. No one really stops to think about anything; they just keep going after the "meat." Don't waste your time on this series.

This book had one of the elements that I hate when reading a book. Everything seem so completely unreal, even for fantasy. People are all powerful and walk away from battles completely unscathed. However, if a book is at least interesting I can tolerate this factor but this book just couldn't hold my attention. It seemed to have a juvenile sense about it. I do give this 2-stars for the effort of being different. The demon realm, the church, the stalkers, the human realm guardians and even Jesus and his disciples were of a completely different origin then the usual fantasy.

Too bad though, I was looking forward to dark and gritty demonic read. Needless to say I won't be reading the next book in the series Demon Hunt due out 8/3/10. I suppose I should give this series a chance to grow but with the abundance of urban fantasy on the market, I just don't have the patience these days.

I don't write reviews... ever.. this is my first on Amazon.. I was going through my library trying to organize some stuff when I came across this supreme waste of my money...I don't even know where to begin on how awfully written, edited and over all put together this book was. I love reading.. its a passion of mine and as such I have pushed through 200 pages of a 600 page book ( The Dragonbone Chair, which is an amazing read by the way.. better than this*)#^*%)

So I pushed through this to utter disappointment in what I'd call a whirligig of mess..I should have just saved several hours of my life..The characters (of which there are way too many who don't link up right), the story line which was sub par at best and the irritating flow of the action not to mention an extreme lack of creativity.. or of the interesting kind anyway..., as it seemed like mythical creatures where picked up at a whim and plopped into the book... I was so mad at this book I actually logged on Amazon for this purpose alone..

SAVE YOUR MONEY!

I rarely flat out don't finish books. I will usually struggle or at least work my way through them to get to the end. This is one that I felt didn't deserve to be finished, and it promptly got posted on Paperback Swap for someone else to give a try.

What drew me to the book was the (of course) urban setting and hello, the chick is holding a freakin' trident on the cover! It's gotta be good right? Wrong. If you read the reviews on Amazon you will see that I'm not the only one who thought so. Except, I only got to page 23 and I quit. You're probably thinking that I didn't give the book a fair shot, but I have my reasons.

A new character by the name of Carter is introduced on page 21. He's described as being a "six-two junior," he's on the basketball team for the college, and has "a kind heart but was deadly in a fight." I know I shouldn't assume, but I'm going to and say that Carter is about 20 years old an African American. Now, Carter says stuff like "Mom Dukes is gone, so we got somewhere to slide if we get lucky, you wit' it?", "That's my dawg.", and "Whatever, man. Just make sure you're at the spot".

Where the introduction of Carter gets messed up (for me) is this sentence, "For a minute you were beginning to scare me. You keep poking around with these dead guys and you're gonna find yourself in a Kelly Armstrong novel."

Now, I know that Kelley Armstrong is well known throughout reading circles and readers of Urban Fantasy and Paranormal Romance, but I find it hard to believe that this 20 year-old male, would know about Kelley Armstrong much less enough about her to know she writes novels about "dead guys." It seemed like this name was tossed in here so the reader would know that the author likes Kelley Armstrong or wanted to be compared to her. If Carter had said Stephen King, I wouldn't have thought twice.

What else totally irked me was that Kelley Armstrong's name was spelled incorrectly (Kelly). Seriously, you're going to write and Urban Fantasy book and put in a popular Urban Fantasy author and then spell her name wrong? It was kind of a slap in the face to me. At this moment in the book I put it down and never picked it up again. This wasn't the main reason, but up until that point the plot was already choppy and the dialogue was static.

The cover is pretty cool for this book and the next one in the series. I saw the back of the book and thought it would be a good read with a new idea. It was a good idea, but not a good read. There were too many characters for a 316 page book. The characters were memorable, but it was confusing. Don't read this digitally because you do have to go back and research stuff, as I call it. The plot reminded me of the Lightning Thief series. I'm giving it two stars because it is finish-able, but I am not recommending it and I will not be doing book two.

I found the writing and editing choppy and irritating - basically a "Eats, Shoots and Leaves" style. The Hero and Heroine could have been interesting if the action had some flow to it. Frankly, I don't blame the writer, a first book needs more editing than spell checking. I purchased this book because I thought the story idea was interesting and because I trusted the publishing house name, although I did know them better for Mysteries - I felt robbed after reading The Dark Storm. Worse, I feel the author will be blamed for a bad book, when all that may have been required was a bit more editing - something publishing houses allegedly pay professionals for. In the future, I will take a long look at any Sci-Fi published by this company.

I picked this "gem" up in the bookstore because I thought it sounded exciting. Boy was I wrong! There seem to be ten different things going on with a million different characters (none of whom were really interesting and all of whom served only to take time away from the "main" characters). Bottom line, I spent half the book skimming to get to the infrequent parts with the characters that I actually purchased the book for. Finally I gave up. Life's too short and this was too boring. Avoid at all costs unless you want to read about vampires, werewolves, evil bishops, mages blah, blah, blah, anyone but Gabriel and De Mona.