A friend of mine recommended Bentley Little’s books to me and I’ve been listening to them all over the last couple of months. This isn’t one of his best stories, but it shares the pacing and style of his others (which have become a relaxing background for my drives and cooking dinner each night.)
This is maybe the third of his books narrated by David Stifel and feel I would almost be in a space of negligence not to mention how awful he is.
The best way to describe Stifel’s narrative style as if he were an alien who had never met a human being but listened to Orson Welles’s original War of the Wolds radio show a hundred times to figure out how to sound like one. His inappropriate inflections and repeated mispronunciations of common and pop culture words and phrases is strange and obnoxious. (In this book, he described a punk rock woman’s t-shirt as displaying the band logo of The Rah-mo-NAYZ. Just to illustrate his misunderstanding of things even an older man should know. Current icons are even worse.) He narrates every young person in a high pitched tinny voice typically reserved for toddler voices, that (if I had any suspicion at all that he knows what’s going on in the book he’s narrating) would almost sound mocking. But it’s not. He just has no clue what an 18-year-old person sounds like.
Stifel also over-pronounces basic plosives to the extent that’s often adds an extra syllable between words the end and then start in them (for example, “wanted treats” becomes “WAN-ted-uh-TREAT-suh”). And don’t even get me started on “Administrative Coordinator”, which, sadly, is a phrase repeated DOZENS of times in this book. I could actually die if I had to hear him say it one more time.
Every female voice (rather than just softening his tone like most male narrators do) is whiney, twangy and makes the character sound as if they’re on the verge of tears at all times, while every expression of emotion that would make sense with a particular specified inflection comes off as either impatience or exasperation with no nuance or range in between. Sarcasm is a ridiculously old-timey lowering of his vocal pitch until it literally sounds like he’s just waiting for a funny trumpet to play “WAH-wah-waaaaaaahhh!” in the background.
There are so many more problems, but my hands are beginning to cramp from typing them out.
I’m taking the time to write all of this because some audiobook producer needs to hear it. The number of books this man has narrated is UNFATHOMABLE. Sitting through one of his performances was kind of funny. Sitting through a second was a bit annoying. After the third, I will never EVER buy another book narrated by him.
The fact that David Stifel has booked and recorded so many gigs makes me feel like no one screens them before putting them up in Audible. Take some pride in the product you are selling. I’m sure David’s trying his best, but someone who knows better needs to encourage him to retire. He’s ruining one of my favorite pastimes and many authors’ hard work.