Author: Lance Manion
Description:
"Merciful Flush is a short story collection culled from 5 years of blogging. It aspires to be the literary equivalent of a video montage, very short stories presented in a manner to elicit a response. While each individually may be taken as funny or crude, poignant or stupid, the hope is that together they inspire the reader to a unique idea of their own."
Review: Here we have a collection of strange little tales, fully of the wacky and the wild. Now, some are hilarious ("the amazing spider man" for instance, when the gives them a moth and spider a right bloody what-for), others are quirky and strange, like the author says, it's like a video montage.
The e-book version it really needs some tweaking for formatting (see below) on Kindle. Additionally, the entire collection needs some editing and proofreading. There were numerous mistakes and usage issues—not enough to kill the story, but enough to really push it down the ranking scale.
The stories are not bad, some are funny, others so-so. It's not everyone's cup of tea and that is OK. As I say in my guide, I'm not going to give poor reviews based on taste—you may be on the floor laughing while I just sit there and stare at you. But with the editing/proofreading issues aside, much of this writing is somewhat puerile (and gosh I hate to say that, but, well...)—there is always room for disjointed, casual, colloquial writing in bizarro. This story has it in bundles, and it often detracts from the story. Again, this is my opinion, your mileage may vary.
I feel really, really bad at having to mark something so low, but that is part of the bargain when soliciting reviews. Lance needs to tighten up his work and maybe go back through and clean some of the passages up. It can get four stars, it really can. This iteration just doesn't have it, but the potential is there.
2 stars
Additional Info: When I did "Look Inside" on Amazon, the formatting was clean and perfect, but the Kindle version I received, page numbers were sometimes in the middle of pages; it made it hard to read, with a paragraph breaking in the middle where a page number was plopped. Some paragraphs had no punctuation, or broke inexplicably on the page... This should be re-tweaked so the e-book lines up with the text.
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