Gods, where to even start? Lets start with the positive, I guess? The premise is decent, and the card mechanics are kind of neat. Nothing earth-shattering or new, but the mechanics were a good framework with which to start. I also appreciate the fact that it kept to the ‘plot’ as thin as that was, and did not devolve into a harem subplot or other such debauchery. Sadly, that is all I can say in terms of positive feedback. Onward to the four points that made this book truly bad:
The MC is Awful.
He is an trope-fueled edgelord but also somehow a white night character with the most Saturday Morning Cartoony dad humor you can imagine. He spends the entire book whining about how he’s ‘such a bad guy, and deserves to be in bad company’ that he repeats it over and over and over to the point where I genuinely smiled when someone shot him. He also has little no no dialogue that isn’t straight from an 8th grader’s edgelord fan-fic but somehow delivered via terrible dad humor. He’s also an idiot with blinders on throughout the story, not noticing any of the glaring red flag signs he’s bludgeoned with throughout the book to telegraph the ending to the reader – which is its own issue.
The Writing is Terrible.
The dialogue throughout the entire book was the same low-budget cartoony trope show you’d see in an 8th grader’s power fantasy fan-fiction. Villains spout evil tropes for the sake of being evil. Goon dialogue only serves to set up the ‘hero’ for terrible one-liners. The innocent pure young virgin falls immediately in love with the older, edge-lord murder thug MC because….reasons? MC doesn’t notice, of course, because white night. You know exactly who the main villain is going to end up being within the first chapter because the reader is force-fed neon signs that scream ‘RED FLAGS!’ in pursuit of the most ham-handed over-the-top foreshadowing I’ve ever seen. Even the choice of narrators for each character literally gives away the plot, which bring same to the next point.
The Narration is Cringe.
Justin Thomas James…is not a great narrator for this type of book. Why? Because when delivering cringe dialogue (of which this book is packed full of), he somehow makes it sound even cringier somehow. He has a voice perfect to encapsulate 8th grader fan-fic, which made this genuinely hard to listen to. Tiana Camacho is essentially the same. I think her performance would have been great…if she hadn’t been delivering pure cringe. Jeff Hays only voiced one character – the most hated one in the book – but he worked as best as was possible with what he was given, I guess. I can’t truly blame the narrators for what they had to work with, but they really did NOT try to salvage the cringe with more serious tones and just decided to lean into it with their inner 8th graders, which just made it worse.
The Plot was Garbage.
I knew who would be the bad guy in chapter one. I knew exactly how each situation would play out because I was beaten over the head with so much ‘foreshadowing’, I was left with a feeling of deja vu throughout the entire experience and just waiting for things to happen that I knew would happen for an hour or more. The only surprises this book offered me were the five star reviews from people that I now assume MUST be 8th graders with similarly cringey fan-fics of their own, the god-awful one-liners, and the fact that I managed to finish it somehow. Thank the gods it wasn’t longer.