November Reviews: Graveyard Shift

M. L. Rio (Wildfire)

Begin review: Oh, my word, what a pretty cover.

End review.

???

All right — a little more, but I hate doing this [that’s not true at all]…

Quite simply, the worst book I have wasted my time on, in as long as I can remember.

Fair: I didn’t like ‘Really good, actually’ (at all), but that is more a taste thing. It is not badly written, and it is, by any definition, a book… even a novel.

But what the hell is Grave Yard Shift? Theoretically, it sits firmly in my wheelhouse. I mean, it should be a bloody compass. It should be a polaroid stuck to the porthole; a portrait of all the dark stories I’ve ever loved. A navigational chart, a…

…Wait…back up. I’m getting emotional. It’s like the zombies are everywhere around me, trying to sing, their voices joining in a painful harmony while someone shouts ‘kill Phil’. Some ‘fun facts’ first:

1. This ‘book’ (definition stretched until it risks snapping the Universe back into a premature Big Crunch) cost me £7.50.

2. Catriona Ward, she of ‘The Last House on Needless Street’ fame, offers in her blurb: ‘Dark, strange and hair-raisingly tense’.

3. An anonymous 5* review inside the cover states, ‘The characters were all relatable, and felt like real people’.

Emmm…. some of my kinder responses —

1. The paperback edition I bought is about 150 pages. Forty of these, at the end, are taken up with a playlist (oh, how wonderfully GenZ-friendly), a cocktail recipe (I shit you not), an author’s essay (alias — irrelevant ramblings) and an extended sample of the next book (I refuse to offer the title). So take this rubbish away, plus the Author’s Note and title pages at the beginning, and I actually got about 100 pages. That’s 7.5p per page. Wasted. The only mitigation? It is, thank goodness, only 100 pages. Honestly, if I wrote everything I wanted to say about this ‘book’, my review would be longer.

2. The only way that Catriona Ward’s blurb can have been meant for Grave Yard Shift is if the publishers handed her the book and left her in a locked, pitch-black closet for three days.

3. Yes, agreed — if you’re a sociopath and you are also locked up in what is, to all intents and purposes, a dark, padded closet with no-one to talk to but the voices of your Great Uncle Marge and somebody called Eddie swirling around your head.

This is the sort of publication that makes me truly wonder about the publishing industry. Her agent, her editor, the marketing team — they all thought this was finished? Gripping? Original?

There is no story (not yet, anyway).

In summary…

The main protagonist has ‘a lump’, which she imaginatively calls ‘The Lump’.

She and some randos meet to smoke in a graveyard.

They find some dead rats.

The rats are infected with a fungus (think Last of Us…no don’t; The Last of Us is actually good).

The antagonist is a beautiful but mad scientist.

One of the smoking gang discovers that they have been infected.

The End.

There is no resolution (which makes sense, because there was nothing to resolve).

There is no choice for the score:

0/7

N.B. I want my bloody money back.