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Velvet Dogma (2011)

by Weston Ochse(Favorite Author)

3.21 of 5 Votes: 2

languge

English

genre

Horror

publisher

Crossroad Press

review 1: I thought the plot and the execution of story were exceptional. Some of the individual sentences make me think this was one of the author's first works. Still, the story arc is worth a few grammar hiccups!!!! Our heroine has spent the past 20 years in prison, mostly in solitaire. She gets released and the story moves from there, putting her through a whirlwind of events in near-future Los Angeles. The story jukes at least three times, but the dissonance defines the story. The reader comes to feel a bit of what the heroine does... namely, that nothing is safe!! I found the end especially satisfying...I did not notice what genre the story is supposed to be, but my feeling was that this is squarely in the cyber-punk camp.If you like Stirling, Stephenson, and Gibson mixed ... morewith a little Lovecraft or King... all in a fresh new voice - you should like this story.All the best,Jay
review 2: This started out with some promise, then just went completely to bad by the halfway point. How?1. Every person the protagonist encounters on this several day long trek immediately becomes some trusted intimate of hers with no particular development of the relationship. It's as though the author used shorthand like "think of all the times in well written books that two people quickly became close. Fill that in here"2. When some of those same people inevitably turn out to be "bad guys" of one kind or another, there is no "punch" whatsoever, again because no real relationship was built.3. Without giving away too much, there is an extended sequence of some characters being inside of a computer system. The experience is described as though they are in a physical world. This worked for Tron because the visuals made the idea less hokey. In written form, it comes across as ridiculously phony. 4. Speaking of "shorthand," the author does nothing to develop the impact that years of solitary confinement has had on the main character. In several places he seems to reference it, but again I think the author took a shortcut here: "You know that would mess you up, so just assume my character is messed up in whatever way suits you best."5. Technical distractions. I admit, this is an IT/science nerd kind of gripe, but at several points there were descriptions of technology that were either inaccurate or so incomplete as to be distracting. One is the displacement of fossil fuels by hydrogen powered cars. There's no mention of where this hydrogen is coming from. Hydrogen is energy storage, not an energy source. Another is describing "06" as binary for an ACK signal in an important part of the book. That's hexadecimal for ACK, something the computer programmers in the book would know. And even though hexadecimal is shorthand for longer strings of binary digits, every programmer I know would refer to that as "hex," not binary. These and other slip-ups in details really break the spell for the reader. less

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