At least once a month I tell myself to stay away from the free books on Kindle, but at the same time, I'm afraid I'm going to miss something, a hidden gem, just waiting to be read. It has happened, but more often than not, I wind up with something like Kamp Koko by Night.
At a mere 27 pages, I guess this work would be considered this work a short story, so the good news is that it was over quickly.
The story is about group of kids, a closed camp, the murdered pedophile who was the owner/manager and now haunts the camp...oh, and there's the hint of a scary clown, too.
There might be a good horror story, struggling to get out, here. But right now it' s buried under poor prose, bad grammar, and a lack of direction.
Descriptions like, "Matching pants and a t-shirt who made him look like a ninja." I don't think "who" should be in that sentence. Elsewhere, in back to back paragraphs, the author references Craig Turner and then Craig Wales. I'm pretty sure they're the same kid. Then there's, "...their families have been in Prosperity Glades by almost a century." Why use "by"? I could go on, but let me just say I was turned off, a number of times by the author's choice of sentence structure.
The story itself has promise, but even that was disjointed , moving from one element or horror to another without ever giving any one part of the tale a chance to develop into anything truly scary.
Kamp Koko by Night was available for free when I got it from Amazon.com, but now it's back to .99 cents. If you see it for free again, you might want to pick it up just to see if I'm crazy for what I say here, but if you have to spend money to read it, I would definitely skip this one.
Dear Mr. Errington,
ReplyDeleteI thank you for spending your time in reading my story and for giving me some good feedback. I agree the story could be a bit confusing out of its context - it is part of a larger anthology set in the same fictional town of my main novel - but my intent was to offer it for free as a sample of my ongoing 'Spirit World' series. I intend to send it back to my editor and fix it. More, once it will be out of Kindle Select, I want to offer it permanently free at Smashwords.
Thank you.
Best wishes Jeffrey and thanks for taking the time to reply.
Delete~Frank