Review: Paranormal Homicide: The Skinners Incident

Paranormal Homicide: The Skinners Incident by Joseph Wright
My rating: 1 of 5 stars

SWEET JEEZUZ.

Where do I even begin with how terrible this book is?

I'm going to apologise right now to the author, because I'm not gonna be softening the blows here.

I mean, this is one of those things that might be GOOD simply because it's SO BAD.

I can't deny how immense my amusement was reading god-awful paragraphs of violence and gore and nonsense (see notes and highlights for examples).

The plot is basically a bunch of people dying under mysterious (supernatural) circumstances. It was hard to see how everything was related at first, and it was all pretty damn messy. People disappearing then turning up dead, mutilated bodies being found, psychic visions ... the plot was messier than that guy who had been skinned in chunks. There's a poor snake that is considered a suspect briefly because one dude is found with claw marks inside his throat?! I mean, how ...?!! *sigh*

There's also this bizarre overuse of full names? Everyone is so formal and full names are used on a regular basis. Erin Cross is almost never referred to as Erin, or Kyle's mother, or even 'she'. And I STILL couldn't keep track of who everyone was. But, to be fair, I skimmed a LOT. It was necessary. Unlike half of this book's words.

We've got play-by-play of pretty much every scene, and it's boring details. A lot of superfluous stuff and endless sentences with poor grammar. The style jumps around a bit which would be okay if it was done cleverly or even just clean but instead it adds to the messiness of the overall story.

The supernatural element is intriguing because the villain is so bizarre, but the psychic visions and the 'she just had a hunch/feeling/knowing' etc were ridiculous and painful.

Then you've got your basic continuity errors (eg: 'a single tear rolled down her face' followed closely by, 'she wiped the tears from her eyes') and pointless repetition (eg: 'she closed her laptop shut' ... 'grabbed her closed laptop' ... 'with her laptop under her arm' all in the same paragraph) and paragraphs of meaningless drivel and it's basically crying out for an editor. I had to choose between laughing or crying over this mess.

There's a unique monster here, but the story itself needs a lot of work to be readable. Then again, maybe I'm just still bitter about that one time I wrote a story that started with, 'They called him the Cat Skinner ...' which basically went downhill from there and my English teacher only gave me a C for it. THAT WAS LITERARY GOLD GODDAMMIT AND THIS GUY TOTALLY STOLE MY IDEA.

But, hey. Judge for yourselves, friends.

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