Review of Before The Storm

[Eric Whitney 1]

[Following is a volunteer review of "Before The Storm" by Charles Wendell Jones.]

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3 out of 5 stars

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Overall, I did enjoy reading a majority of this short story collection, however a few of them were rather poorly written when it came to writing practices such as “Show, don’t tell” and having well written dialogue. For many of the stories, the author is very good with the descriptions, grammar and prose in general in the stories that have little to no dialogue. In the more dialogue heavy stories though, the characters’ lines of speech aRe almost laughably bad as I’ll point out in a couple examples below.

Things I really enjoyed:
The book’s official description says these are tales of good and evil, and although I could argue some of the “good” tales weren’t amazingly good, it’s the stories of the downright evil characters where I felt the book is at its best. A couple of my favorite short stories from the collection were Stage Struck and One Drop at a Time. These two are some of the darker stories of the collection, but are very well thought out with descriptive narratives and had good twists.

Weaknesses:
Every Boy’s Dream was an especially cringeworthy story to read because it was poorly written, containing both bad prose and the even worse dialogue. At about ten pages long, it’s not the longest story, but most of its pages are walls of text, with much of the dialogue mixed into them.
He Loves Me — I Know that Now and the final story Misfits did have interesting dark themes, but unfortunately much of their prose and dialogue also suffered from poor writing. With a bit of editing and revising of the dialogue, I think they could have turned out to be much better quality.

Typos and errors:
I did find a fair amount of errors, around 15 or so, but on a good note, most of them were simple extra punctuation marks added or missing in wrong places.

A quick note on Profanity:
There are a handful of uses of the D*** word across a couple of the stories, with also one count each of a woman being called a “B****” and a few pages later the male antagonist is called a “B******” — both of these uses are in the He Loves Me — I Know that Now short story.

In closing, I think I would still be interested in reading more from this author.

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Before The Storm
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