Yzabel / August 2, 2012

Dreams of Darkness by Barry James

My rating: [rating=2]

Summary:

Jordan Hanson was having a bad day. His girlfriend was acting distant, his cat had run off, his car was leaking oil, there was something screwy with the electrical system in his new house, and to top it all off he got caught in a storm. By the end of the day, though, Jordan would have given anything to get his old life back. Or any life at all, for that matter. Even an undead existence in which he was not about to be used as a tool to end the world would have been better than nothing….

Review:

I had a hard time deciding on what to write in this review. I’ve been editing my stars from 3 to 2, from 2 to 3… I really have no idea. It’s not a bad book. It contains a lot of things that I liked, yet at the same time, it still didn’t cut it for me in the end. I would’ve given it a 2.5/5, but for want of such flexibility in the marks here, I will leave it at 2. Although what “didn’t cut it for me” is way more subjective than through any fault of the novel itself, I feel it also plays a part in one’s enjoyment of a book, and as such, I can’t really leave it out of my review.

There’s quite an amount of pros in favour of “Dreams of Darkness”. The author created a believable mythos for his world, one that is detailed and well-explained, and that flows together believably. The descriptions are very vivid, making it extremely easy to picture what’s happening; same goes for the action scenes. In fact, I’m positive this novel would make a great movie or mini-TV series. It is quite a ‘visual’ story—and a graphic one, too, in its depiction of the horrors that are the demons, their actions, and the people that command them! (This is not a negative point, by the way. I thought it was clear from the start that there would be gory aspects to it, and they didn’t shock me; on the contrary, given the themes tackled in it, they were logical and expected.) The story deals with interesting questions, namely Jordan’s humanity (can he remain sane and human enough, in spite of what he is?), whether one’s nature will necessarily determine one’s destiny, or the influence of power on one’s psyche. Also, the plot is complex, yet not confusing, and the characters appropriate to its development.

So why did I write that the book didn’t do it for me in the end? That’s the tricky part: I still have no precise idea why. I think it had to do with the writing, that I felt was a little ‘dry’, but not in terms of description of details—it was more a feeling than anything else. My rational mind was satisfied, but not my emotional one, if I may say so. I couldn’t really root for the characters, for instance, as if there was a very thin, invisible wall between them and me. It took me too much time to finish this book, too, when I actually had plenty of time to do so; I kept on putting it down, thinking it wasn’t for me; the parts between the action scenes dragged a little, too (the background information regularly given by some of the characters sometimes felt too much like info-dumping, which didn’t help). However, at the same time, I kept going back to it, because, let’s be honest, I still wanted to know how the story would go on. The last quarter or so of the book got me in for good; unfortunately, this came too late in my reading.