Customer Reviews

The Void

5 star:		(12)
4 star:		(5)
3 star:		(1)
2 star:		(2)
1 star:		(8)

 

 

The reviewer from Hong Kong writes that he saw no blurbs on the cover of _The Void_ by writers he recognized. I saw one: a very favorable quote from Thomas Ligotti, a writer I consider to be at the top of today's "horror" authors, above both Clive Barker and Stephen King in ability. So I expected a lot from this book and was somewhat disappointed in it as a result.

I would class Teri A. Jacobs as a writer to watch. She has plenty of lyrical talent, but in _The Void_ she strains far too hard for effect, and the resulting novel is a young writer's mistake: everything is intense, and as a result, nothing is memorable because nothing really sticks out from all that intensity. When all is climax, the ultimate result is boredom: this 300-odd page book felt much longer; 30 minutes after I put the book down, I couldn't remember the main characters' names; the plot seemed vague at best in my memory. Even the considerable screechy, scratchy, maggotty gore sequences ran into one another because there were simply so many of them.

Give Jacobs props for her intelligence, for the research into Aztec/Mayan beliefs she evidently did and the wild imagination she throws into her vignettes of violence. _The Void_ might have worked better as a novelette ... I'm not sure. In the end, I wish her editors had had a few more long coffee sessions with her and reined in some of the book's excess. I look forward to her next efforts.

Despite some of these reviewers implying that only morons or poor readers won't enjoy this book, the simple fact is that The Void is a very poor effort. While ostensibly imaginative, the plot here is hobbled by Ms. Jacobs prose, which is so overblown that it fails to do what it should: communicate a strong story with a powerful voice. Instead, we're attacked by purple prose. Ms. Jacobs needs to set her thesaurus aside (or more likely, to turn it off on her Word Program) and write in a more direct, clear and sophisticated manner.

Totally unreadable. Jacobs overwrites to the hilt until her purple prose crams in your throat. Stopped me dead by the third chapter. How'd this person get published?

Teri Jacob's The Void has an interesting concept. A girl's father makes a pact with a Mexican-Indian shaman who is actually a priest for the deities of the Mayan hell called Xibalba (pronounced shee-balba). The price of this bargain involves his daughter,family,and town in a nightmare of astronomical proportions which leads to the sadistic and tortured demise of most of them. The daughter Leslie is pursued by The Dark Man, another servant of the underworld who's identity is perhaps supposed to be a shock at the end of the book but is utterly transparent yet dropped almost casually in the hopes that readers might miss it.

The concept, while imaginitive, is sorely hampered by the delivery. Haphazard plot development, excessive verbiage construed to appear as proficient literacy, and a lack of any character development makes it impossible to root for or against anyone(including our villain, the Dark Man). The villain's motives and reasons for serving hell are never explained and in the end the book has an incredibly disappointing conclusion. Most readers will lose interest before the convluted plot begins to make even rudimentary sense and choosing a mythology virtually unknown to most readers does not help in capturing their attention either.

Jacobs obviously savors the detailed gore and carnage the of her amalgam of the Aztec/Mayan mythos she has woven and it is indeed a frightening place, well researched in all aspects. But inventive deaths do not make good books. Even Stephen King realized that a book cannot be all shock unless there are more compelling issues in a book like plot, structure, and engaging characters. This is where The Void falls short. Fortunately there is potential and with a solid editor and some economy of words Jacobs can achieve a much better work then this rambling debut.

I usually keep my opinions to myself when it comes to matters of personal taste, but I'm having a hard time seeing how all these reviews can be so glowing. This book is unreadable. I managed 100 pages before I had to put it down. Obviously, I'm not the target audience for this type of story (even though I thought I was), but I can't even assume there was an editor involved here. Someone compared it to Lovecraft, and I'm thinking Britney Spears is the next Aretha Franklin. I don't want to be rude, or entirely negative, so I will say that the writer has a good imagination. The premise of the story is a good one. It's the delivery that falls short. Oh well, I guess you can't please everybody.

Yes, this writer does have a grasp of the English Language, but it's from the 16th century. The prose is too overblown, too wordy. One of the other reveiwers here had it right, she spent too much time with a thesaurus, and not enough with the plot. I read the book until page 150 then had to put it down, because I had no idea what was going on. I read alot, I'm not dumb, but this is really a waste of money. Stick with King and Koontz for electrifying reads. It seems that every time I try a new writer, I get something totally worthless.

From where I stand, it seems that Leisure knows which wonderful authors to publish so long as those authors have a long-running career. But if you see a first novel coming out from the Leisure horror line, you can pretty much forget about it.

Such is the case with Teri Jacobs' novel The Void. This is a weak effort where the author strives like a swimmer caught in the ocean current to be "literary." She flounders and splashes and flails throughout her narrative, but never once achieves a strong, comfortable voice that can draw the reader in. Instead, we get writing that is filled with such purple prose that any editor with an ounce of shame would have struck out.

I don't know who does the acquisitions at the Leisure Books horror department but he should fire his first readers or spend more time on his slush pile. Too many awful first novels are finding their way into print there.

Leslie is a photographer who is haunted by the death of her father and troubled by visions of a hellish underworld and of a Dark Man stalking her. Having left her hometown and severed all contact with her past after being raped by her stepfather years ago, she is suddenly called back now after one of her old friends has been murdered. One by one, others once close to her die in unexplainable ways. She feels her Dark Man getting closer even as an unearthly power within her threatens to emerge.

Just when it seems that the only things people write about anymore are vampires, Jacobs gives us a fresh subject (or at least one you don't see very often): Mexican death gods. Her writing has a flowing, literary quality that possesses a strange kind of beauty even as she describes sickening acts. It vividly depicts a surreal nightmare of a realm called Xibalba, where demons routinely torture unfortunate souls in sacrifice to higher powers. But unlike many of the current crop of horror authors, there is far more to her story than graphic violence.

The fact that it is so well-written and original makes the final act that much more disappointing. It is all but incoherent. The fate of the story's primary antagonist is also unsatisfying. It is indicated from the start that he is someone who knows Leslie, but apart from him being a servant of dark gods, no motive is revealed. And when we do learn his identity, it is done in such a casual way that you could miss it if you aren't paying attention.

Despite the letdown at the end, the novel is still good enough to recommend. If you're tired of the same old retreads, this should satisfy on most levels. I'm eager to read whatever she comes out with next.

Teri Jacobs smashes the reader over the head with her use of an overblown narrative style. Clearly she took every simple sentence, ran to her thesaurus and immediately substituted the longest word she could find. The novel is filled with purple prose that is supposed to sound lyrical but winds up reading like a grade-schooler's first try at poesy. Run-on sentences abound. If there's a plot to this novel I never got in enough to find out. I can tell you that the first half of the book is a mess of sexual images and hackneyed horror without any erotic or frightful content. Perhaps someone should inform the author that sometimes less is more. Good for a laugh and little else.

Teri A. Jacobs' prose is so stiflingly purple that I'm shocked she's been published at all. This author makes all the mistakes that a 10th grader might make on a creative writing homework assignment; she actually believes that being purple and flowery are good things in a story. Every time I made a serious effort to delve into the book, the author's hyper-overblown style knocked me right out again. I can't even tell you what the plot is because my head was spinning just trying to make sense of the narrative voice. Forget this one. A-Void!