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trike's review
1.0
I picked up this book on a mad dash through the bookstore so I didn't give it the once-over I usually do. I so wish I had, because it's just not good. It's at least honest about its pulp roots, as you can see right on the cover. I was in the mood for some good pulp fiction but this failed to deliver on the "good" part of that.
Captain Midnight Chronicles is a collection of new short stories based on the popular classic radio character who later was translated to movies, TV and comic books. I've never seen the earlier incarnations, but surely they must be better than this if the tales of the Secret Squadron had millions of fans and spawned a multimedia franchise. Some of the stories in this book are passable while others are just downright terrible, as bad as the worst fan-fiction you'll find on the internet. The tales range form the outlandish to the downright silly, but overall they're just not good.
Each story has a drawing to kick it off, and almost without fail the drawings bear no resemblance to the stories. The pictures are clearly based on the stories but the artist either didn't read the relevant passages or he just didn't care, because they don't match the descriptions at all. Which is a shame, because the drawings are actually extremely good.
I get annoyed by typos in books, but worse offenders are grammar and punctuation errors. A couple of these getting through the writing, rewriting and editing process are understandable. Captain Midnight Chronicles has the most egregious amount of typos and misspelling I've ever seen in any book, ever. Internet fan-fiction is actually preferable in this regard. One story was almost literally a long string of typos and mistakes with hundreds of those weird little figures one gets when dumping a Word document into any program. That sort of thing is simply inexcusable because it doesn't take someone with any understanding of English, just someone who has eyes.
Another thing that has just been irking me immeasurably is the fact that this character is a pilot yet there has not been a single time where they've spelled "hangar" correctly. I mean, seriously guys, it's not an "airplane hanger." That just looks stupid. It makes me leery of ever wanting to pick up another book from this publisher, Moonstone.
Avoid.
Captain Midnight Chronicles is a collection of new short stories based on the popular classic radio character who later was translated to movies, TV and comic books. I've never seen the earlier incarnations, but surely they must be better than this if the tales of the Secret Squadron had millions of fans and spawned a multimedia franchise. Some of the stories in this book are passable while others are just downright terrible, as bad as the worst fan-fiction you'll find on the internet. The tales range form the outlandish to the downright silly, but overall they're just not good.
Each story has a drawing to kick it off, and almost without fail the drawings bear no resemblance to the stories. The pictures are clearly based on the stories but the artist either didn't read the relevant passages or he just didn't care, because they don't match the descriptions at all. Which is a shame, because the drawings are actually extremely good.
I get annoyed by typos in books, but worse offenders are grammar and punctuation errors. A couple of these getting through the writing, rewriting and editing process are understandable. Captain Midnight Chronicles has the most egregious amount of typos and misspelling I've ever seen in any book, ever. Internet fan-fiction is actually preferable in this regard. One story was almost literally a long string of typos and mistakes with hundreds of those weird little figures one gets when dumping a Word document into any program. That sort of thing is simply inexcusable because it doesn't take someone with any understanding of English, just someone who has eyes.
Another thing that has just been irking me immeasurably is the fact that this character is a pilot yet there has not been a single time where they've spelled "hangar" correctly. I mean, seriously guys, it's not an "airplane hanger." That just looks stupid. It makes me leery of ever wanting to pick up another book from this publisher, Moonstone.
Avoid.
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