I did really enjoy this story. So it’s unfortunate that it is so consistently inconsistent. I was regularly pulled from the storyline by lazy writing cliche’s and editing fails.
The author repeatedly uses clunky, one-sentence, backstory justifications for why a character says or does something that seems stupid or incongruous. Which just feels like he couldn’t be bothered to set up the characters and the world properly.
He also seemed to be compulsively directed to use the same bad-horror-movie trope of having the characters be distracted by something in the middle of a life or death fight, which inevitably adds fake drama to the situation by giving the bad guy the upper hand. He did this in literally every single fight… often more than once in the same scene. It was so bad I felt like I was watching fight scenes from the original, live-action Batman TV show.
Finally, this book was just poorly edited, both for word choice, content, and factual consistency.
The Soundbooth Theater narration was about what I have come to expect when Jeff Hayes is not the lead performer… which is to say it was pretty good, but nowhere near as well done as when Jeff Hayes is at the helm, i.e., bad/unnecessary sound effects, editing issues, and over-dramatized exclamations and performances.
All in all, I would still recommend this book to Oster fans, but if you’re the kind of person who has a hard time staying engaged through clunky writing and editing this may not be worth your time. For me this is an extremely rare example of a poorly executed story that still has an interesting enough plot and characters to keep me listening till the end.
I’ll probably check out the next book, though if the prose and story editing aren’t improved it’s unlikely I’ll make it to the third book.