…And a questionable production by the normally fantastic Soundbooth Theater.
First, this book falls into the sub-genre of post-apocalyptic RPG GameLit where after an outside force hijacks the planet, seeds it with horrible monsters and introduces an RPG style interface/stat system, the remaining humans must level up to survive.
So yes, this does have quite a few similarities to The System Apocalypse by Tao Wong among others. That said, though the circumstances might be similar, the characters are totally different. And Willmarth is telling such a compelling story that the similarities fall by the wayside. I think it would be shortsighted and petty to lower the number of stars given just because this book’s setup shares some of its primary features with another book that came before it.
Now on to the production. As I said up top, Soundbooth Theater has generally produced great audiobooks in my experience. There have been a few titles here and there that didn’t rock my world, but on the whole they’re great.
Here, for some unknown reason, they decided to add a bunch of totally unnecessary sound effects and tension building drums to all of the action sequences. I found it jarring, ham-handed, and lacking in any kind of subtlety. Worst of all, it repeatedly pulled me out of the story. I could compare it to watching a movie and every 20 minutes or so your TV would shoot out a cloud of the smell of whatever is happening…
Though it didn’t ruin the book, I didn’t ever get to the point where the sound effects and drums were ever more than a distraction. When the narrator tells you that a character shoots his rifle, you really don’t need to hear a canned sound effect of a gunshot two seconds later in order to understand that the rifle has been fired and what that shot sounds like.
In essence what Soundbooth Theater has done here is decided that our imaginations are not competent to recreate these things in our minds eye and therefore has decided to help us out by making a crunching noise every time one of the characters breaks a bone. What’s next… will they start including accompanying video files and flashing a picture of the car that the characters are driving every time it’s mentioned that they entered an automobile?
Though I applaud their enthusiasm and efforts to bring the art of the audiobook to a new level, the way they are going about it is just misguided.
That said, the narrator and most of the character voices were superb as usual. Regardless, of the problems with the sound effects this book is still a no-brainer when it comes to spend a credit.