Customer Reviews

The Sleep of the Gods

5 star:		(28)
4 star:		(17)
3 star:		(4)
2 star:		(5)
1 star:		(5)

 

 

This book reads like a cheesy Saturday night SyFy movie. If you are looking for substance, intelligence, and above all credibility of action/reaction in a disaster scenario, you will not find it in this fiction novel. There are three major issues in this book. Together they kill the plot.

First, the author overly relies on delayed revelation, to the point that it becomes laughable, because it is so contrived and unrealistic. Characters consistently refuse to describe what they experienced, and when they do so it is cryptic and downright irritating. I'm ok with leaving some to the reader's imagination, but this overly artificial.

Second, characters and their backgrounds are completely inconsistent with their abilities and their decision-making process. An air force officer would never have the means to purchase a large yacht and fully customize it for survival.

Third, one of the basic tenets of disaster plots is a solid treatment of associated hardships and the ingenious survival techniques developed by the survivors. The survivor's camp in the mall is completely incoherent.

Overall, I am sorely disappointed. I actually read the reviews prior to purchasing, but apparently not very many readers share my views. I'm trying to finish the book to get my $2.99 worth. I'm halfway through, but I keep putting it down because it is so mind-numbingly idiotic.

One more thing... it's anchors "aweigh", not anchors "away". You don't throw your anchor away, you lift it up out of the water, lifting the weight, hence aweigh... And you don't drop anchor in the marina when you are tied up at the dock!!! Why would you do that???? This just one of many examples that shows how little the author knows of what he's writing about.

As a first novel, I found 'The Sleep of the Gods' by James Sperl to be (hopefully) a precursor of great things to come. While there are some inconsistencies in the storyline, and the book is in need of a good editor, all in all I was very impressed. He definately thought up some end-of-the-world causes that no other writer has yet imagined. His grasp of science seems very good, and while his character developement could use a bit of fleshing out, his characters did seem real to me, which is most of the battle right there. Also the fact that he offered this book quickly on Kindle and for an extremely reasonable $2.99 made me quite happy. I am a post-apocalyptic book expert, and I've read almost everything the genre has to offer. This new addition was a happy suprise, and I can't wait to see what Mr. Sperl comes up with next.

From its incongruous title to its overwrought use of suspense to its slinky-like compression and expansion of time as the plot advances, this book is oddball in so many aspects.

First, the title. Relationship to the actual contents of the book: Zero. Of course, the author may have his reasons for endowing the book with "The Sleep of the Gods" - but in this case, the post-apocalyptic premise and storyline have as much to do with the title as, oh, say, a pack of double-A batteries.

Plot? Well, yes, there are holes aplenty. A virus/bio/alien something infects humans and animals, creating a new class that requires UV radiation (mainly from sunlight) to survive...and they're supposedly dumb as rocks...but THOUSANDS of them manage to survive over multiple nights by finding and rigging battery-powered lights that happen to emit a few feeble UV rays. All on night one of the disaster. Wait, what?

As mentioned by others, one of the heroes of the story is offstage for most of the book - an Air Force officer who is able to provide all sorts of Bill Gates-style accouterments for his family (but not an actual rescue or anything). I can buy this a bit easier than others; the author did note that he was a kind of black-ops guy, and for all we know, his Air Force rank may have been cover for some blacker-than-NSA uber-clearance Platinum-Amex expense-account REAL job.

Some plot holes I can forgive; others I can't. And the author makes three glaring errors that keep this book from being spectacular. First, he doesn't get the darn thing proofed. You don't get an injury to your calve, doofus; you get an injury to your calf.

Second, the author kills off a major and highly developed, sympathetic character at the end. Not that you couldn't see it coming from 20 chapters away.

And third, the author exceeds his allocation of "her eyes welled with tears" and similar hackneyed expressions by a factor of 10.

Get. A. Decent. Editor.

As this is an indie book and it cost $2.99, I would still recommend it to friends who are into PA fiction and want to explore a unique perspective on the faux-zombie genre. What I would like even more is if a major publishing house picked up the book, cleaned it up, modified some of the subplots a bit and set things up for a rollicking sequel. (The elements for a great sequel are there. Really. Buried in the author's ham-handed prose, but there nonetheless.)

"The Sleep of the Gods" is James Sperl's debut novel. I came across it after doing a search for "apocalyptic fiction" in the Kindle store at Amazon. I had read most of the books that came back in the results, but "Sleep" was something new. It had good reviews, so I decided to try a free sample on my Kindle. This is the genius of the Kindle. I might have tried the book sight unseen - I might not have - but after reading the first chapter I was hooked.

I really enjoyed this book. Was it perfect? No. The explanation for For some reason there were formatting errors in my Kindle copy of the book, so the font would change from page to page - sometimes paragraph to paragraph. It was very annoying. Sperl puts forth a very good debut effort, but still could have tightened things up in a few sections. It was a fresh story, and while it sometimes felt like it borrowed from other sources (there is one scene with a bus being attacked by birds that felt like it was lifted directly from "Resident Evil: Extinction"), I thought it did a good job of providing a view of the end of the world that I had not seen before. I'm anxious to see what James Sperl puts out next.

Good,compelling thriller from a first time novelist, working in some interesting twists in a familiar end-of-the-world sub-genre. Some have quibbled about the implausibility of the threat and possible inconsistencies in minor plot-lines, but if the book lacks absolute clockwork precision, it more than makes up with it by its building narrative momentum and suspense. The heroine of the story is a mother of 2 teenagers and a middle-schooler, but Sperl doesn't allow the book or the thrills to be bogged down in mundane family squabbling. He conveys enough credible family dynamics to anchor the characters and hanging on with them for the harrowing ride was a real change of pace from the stock loner/scientist/soldier male characters who usually populate such stories. This is a story of a woman who is not a super hero, but who tries to be a super mom under extraordinary circumstances. This is the first Kindle book I've read where I've had the hook set deep enough that I found myself pulling up Kindle for PC when I had a spare moment at the office, and the newly released Kindle for Blackberry when I was away from my desktop and my Kindle.

I enjoyed this book very much, reading it almost non-stop over two days and I recommend it to anyone who enjoys apocalyptic fiction. I especially enjoyed the main character being a woman and a mother as it gave really different angle on this type of story.

That said, here is the good and bad as I think of the book after I read it, not during:

****ATTENTION SPOILERS BELOW****




******SERIOUSLY SPOILERS SO STOP READING IF YOU DON'T WANT TO KNOW THIS STUFF******



*****I'M NOT KIDDING - SPOILERS!!!!

Good:

1. The main character is realistically written and a welcome change from the typical man take on things. You root for her the whole way and if your a mother you know you would act in exactly the way she does (or if you have been married to one for as many years as I have)

2. The take on the "zombies" is different and entertaining. And even believable in many ways - who knows what kind of life forms are developing on our planet that could change our lives forever? No eating brains in this story and as much as I love a good brain being eaten, I found this refreshing.

3. The writing is good. The main characters - her kids mainly - are well developed. The ending is great.

BAD:

When I said you would have to suspend belief in more ways that one I meant that besides suspending belief that zombies exist, you have to suspend belief in some major plot issues which follow:

1. No way a Lt Col in the Air Force has the money to build the fantastic, and no doubt crazy expensive, methods of escape/safety and survival that this guy built for his family. Sure he could have swung a nice boat and built that shelter in the back yard on his budget but that shelter out in the country? Please. You're talking a million bucks and maybe more for that thing. (I was an Air Force officer so I know this to be a fact.)

2. Also no way her husband would have been able to hook her up with encrypted computer equipment and all this other stuff that made it possible for her to contact him. He'd have been busted easy.

3. And even if he did have that kind of money (trust fund?), when would he have had time to build it? Yes, they took off a couple of times a year for "vacations" which would have been plenty to stock and learn to sail the boat, but build that shelter in the country? Please, two people simply could not have done it. It would take a slew of construction firms to do it and even if they left the construction to those firms most of the time, they would still have to supervise way more than they said they went out there.

4. Which leads me to the next issue - security and secrecy at the site of the shelter. Any construction worker who worked on the thing is going to know its location and probably end up out there with his or her family just waiting for it to be opened up. I know I would be.

5. My next issue is WHY did they get on the boat in the first place? If the whole story was that he would call her and give her a code that tells her the "end of the world" is coming and nothing else, wouldn't it be better for them to head straight to that shelter in the country? If it had been a nuclear attack how the hell would they be able to come back even after a few months and make it through the radiation to get in the radiation proof shelter? Assuming they survived the attack even at sea. Obviously the story was set up that way (the boat trip) so that they could come back and have no idea what had happened, and that's fine because it carried the story along, but seriously, it's a major flaw.

6. The infamous key. What, they only had one? Seriously, I guess it makes sense that the key to the shelter at their house would stay at their house, but why did the country shelter key have to stay at the house? They couldn't hide one above ground near the country shelter? All that money spent on the place and they couldn't put a key in a box hidden somewhere near there that only they knew about? And it's just a fricken key anyway - why didn't she keep one on each of her key chains? Most people have keys on their key chains that they don't even remember where they go so it wouldn't be a big deal. Or maybe a key hidden on the boat? Sigh.

7. There are some other issues - only one handgun and a .22 rifle for protection for example. You can buy a few handguns, a couple of M4s and a thousand rounds on that guy's budget I am sure. Also, the zombies seem to be quite few in number and that perplexed me at first - shouldn't there be millions of them? But then I thought they must have been dying off in great numbers until they got smart enough to fix their weakness so it made sense. Still, a two paragraph of explanation of that would have been good.

Anyway, despite these issues I really enjoyed the book. You might think that is a contradiction but no, not really, because all these thoughts sprang up AFTER I read the book and had time to think on it. WHILE I was reading it I brushed them off and just enjoyed the story, which was very entertaining.

This writer is good, and he could be even better if he plugs holes like this in future books.

So that's it . . . and now to quote Dennis Miller . . .

"Of course, that's just my opinion. I could be wrong."

I bought this on the Kindle because it sounded like my style and the price was right. Every once in awhile, you stumble upon a true gem and this is one of those instances.
The book is fast paced, but not so fast you can't keep up with all the characters (who are generally well fleshed out and believable). The sequences are realistic for the most part as well. Every book has to have some "who would do that" or "there's no way that's possible" moments, but Sperl kept it to a minimum and for that I enjoyed the book even more.
It's an apocalyptic tale that combines several of the common end of the world themes into one, yet remains unique. I don't want to give away what brings about the cataclysm because that is part of the fun of reading this book. Just trust me when I say it is original and familiar at the same time, but in a good way on both sides of that coin.
Definitely a writer I will be looking to read more of in the future.

I really enjoyed this book. I like this genre and was pleased about the creativity in the plot. I felt that the action was a bit slow to start but it paid off. By the end I couldn't put it down and had to stay up until 3am to finish it! It was fun read--a great summer vacation book.

I give it a minus 4. I did enjoy the book, especially the first half, and thought the writing was excellent, but... By the end I was saying, just give up, lady, I'm tired of this! I agree with one of the reviewers here, you had to suspend belief in several areas to accept the scenario. By the time I finished the book I was exhausted. It was a very good first effort though and I'm looking forward to his next one.

It was exactly what I was hoping for! An apocalyptic novel full of suspense and action that keeps you turning pages. I really don't get the negative reviews about the "scientific" aspects of the book ruining the plot. The book was very well written and thus easy to get absorbed into the story and suspend belief when you needed to. It is after all a fiction book and I don't expect all the scientific details to measure up and to be on par with what you might find in a non fiction book. Also don't shy away if you're thinking you won't enjoy it because it's involves zombies. I have no interest in the typical zombie books and this is nothing like those. I can't say more without giving away the plot but I think the word "zombie" is mentioned maybe twice and for me at least, what happens to some of the people in the story is not what I imagine a zombie to be. All and all a great book and highly recommended for any that enjoy apocalyptic fiction!