The Ares Weapon by D.M. Pruden
My rating: 3 of 5 stars
The Ares Weapon by D.M. Pruden is a novella sized, Indie Sci-Fi/thriller. Dr Melanie Destin has a dream to start a new life on Mars. She is unwittingly coaxed into taking on a new job and soon finds out that not all is what it’s meant to be.
The Cover: The cover isn’t the best I’ve seen, it doesn’t scream out pick me up, but it isn’t bad and it’s one I would take a second look when browsing in a store. It tweaks my interest, does a good job conveying they genre and gives you a feel for what the story is going to be about.
The Good Stuff: Okay, I’m going to have a little rant above about the bad stuff later, but first let’s take a look at the positives of this book. Putting aside all the issues below, I actually enjoyed the story and found it easy to read. I think the author has a good concept of sentence and paragraph length. There are well constructed sentences (outside of those that have lost a word or have repeated the same word twice) and the prose runs smoothly. There is a good balance of description, narrative and dialogue and there’s also some good lines in the story, like ‘The smell of unwashed bodies hung in the poor airflow of the hundred-year-old tram car.’ There were little touches in this story that brought it to life for me, things like water rations running out in the shower and having to pay a premium for five more minutes. There has also been a lot of work put into the plot, and while I questioned some of the turns, I accepted them freely enough because I was enjoying the story and wanted to see how things worked out. The characters are well formed and there is both a strong protagonist and a ruthless antagonist, who both play key parts in the story and help to develop the plot. Another thing to note is that while I’m not a fan of first person, apart from one paragraph that annoyed me, it was done very well.
The Bad Stuff: This book had a lot of niggling issues for me. The content could do with a copy edit/proof read as there are several missing conjunctive words, double conjunctive words (i.e. the the) and at least one spelling mistake throughout the book (I know this seems petty, and normally I would expect that, but combined with the other issues it irked me).
There are also quite a few Latin words used in the story, and while I understand what the author was trying to achieve, I found this distracting. A bigger issue in my opinion, is that chapters jump from third person to first person narrative and back. I am not a fan of first person and in one particular paragraph it seemed like every sentence started with ‘I’. There was also some head hopping, thoughts shown in italics in some places, yet plain text in others, and a mirror scene used to describe the protagonist.
I found some issues with the logic in the story too – The whole squatter thing didn’t make sense to me. Squatters rarely look after a squat house and it is even rarer that they leave of their own accord. Besides, it would make more sense to rent your apartment out if you knew you would be away for an extended period, especially if you are saving for your dream. As a reader I would also have been more sympathetic to the protagonist if she had not so easily (and so willingly) reverted to her old life, but rather had been set up to make it look like she had done so.
I don’t normally read Sci-Fi or Thrillers, but on the whole this is a good, enjoyable read. I feel that if the author spends a little time fixing up some of the issues and releasing a version 2, it could end up as a great book. I’m giving this one 3 out of 5 golden bookmarks.
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Allan Walsh writes Fantasy and Horror. If you’re looking for something new to read in these genres, why not check out his books here.
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