ASSAULTED SOULS by William Blackwell

3 out of 5 stars

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How I discovered this book: it was submitted to Rosie's Book Review Team, of which I am a member.

Genre: Post Apocalyptic

This first instalment of the Assaulted Souls series is a short novel (possibly a novella) of just 183 pages.  The setting is an alternative reality ~ the year 2016, three months after a nuclear blast.  The story opens with Nathan King - who has lost his memory due to a fall from a balcony - waking up in a cave with a man he doesn't recognise and no recollection about how he got there.  Great opening.  We soon find out that the cave is on Prince Edward Island, which I assume to be off the coast of Canada, and Nathan begins to piece facts together via information from the stranger (Edward) and his own still hazy memory.

Elsewhere, Nathan's girlfriend, Cadence, is held captive by the cannibalistic Thorvald.  In another cave we meet escaped convicts Karl and Russ.  Everyone is scared of the Neanderthals, a group of other escaped convicts from the same facility as Karl and Russ.

This opening to the series has a lot going for it; there is some excellent, amusing dialogue (both spoken and inner), and the setting descriptions totally worked; I could imagine every scene.  It rips along, and I found each character to be clearly defined from the outset.  Mr Blackwell can certainly write, and this is one of my favourite genres. 

However, much though I enjoyed the author's writing style and humour, I feel that the book needs more work ~ careful redrafting, the fine-tuning of ungrammatical sentences, and more attention to structure.  The backstory of some important issues, such Nathan's amnesia and the nuclear blast itself, are brushed off in the odd short paragraph (some of which read like notes that were written with the intention of expanding them in a later draft), whereas a story about some trouble with a difficult tenant in Nathan's past life was more detailed than necessary for such short book, and not particularly relevant; the tenant does appear later on, but is in and out within a couple of pages.  Mr Blackwell is clearly imaginative, articulate and can write some captivating sentences (which is much of what writing a good book is all about), but there were too many that made me go 'ouch'. At first I was highlighting passages and making the note 'ill-thought out sentence'.  As I found myself highlighting more and more, I shortened it to 'ITOS'.  Then I gave up.   A few examples:

'..his stomach was still knotted with hunger and when he had woke up this morning he had even...' ~ either 'when he woke up', or 'when he had woken'.

'The radiation had already infected his mind, producing a stark raving lunatic'.  Better: 'turning him into a stark etc', or something like 'producing worrying psychotic tendencies'; I think the phrase 'stark raving lunatic' is a more like something you'd read in a comic book, anyway. 

There are run-on sentences (two independent clauses without an appropriate punctuation mark or conjunction to separate them) and non-sentences such as this: 'Suddenly banging and growling at the door.'

To sum up, the basics are all there, but in my opinion it needs fleshing out, more re-drafting and the help of a good copy editor for it to stand up as the good example of this genre that it could be.



Note: If anyone is looking for such a thing, the best editor I know of, Alison Williams, has 20% off bookings in April and May this year.  More HERE.