Official Review: Nocturnal by Tim W BYrd
Posted: 18 Aug 2019, 05:01
[Following is an official OnlineBookClub.org review of "Nocturnal" by Tim W BYrd.]
1 out of 4 stars
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Professor Davis and six of his chosen students explore a cave on an uninhabited island off of Costa Rica. What should have been a month-long expedition turns into a living nightmare. The explorers find out that they are not alone on the island after all. Years ago, an island tribe used to worship a nocturnal animal. It was believed to be half-human and half-bat. When the Professor goes missing one night, along with their only method of communication with anyone off the island, his students must find him. Will they help him before it's too late? Who will survive the night?
Nocturnal by Tim W. Byrd is only 108 pages long. However, the copy I received was split into two books. The second book was titled Nocturnal Battle of the Breed. It would have been better to advertise this as a sequel or to combine them into a single book. I found this confusing, as I did not expect there to be two books when I selected this to review. Even with both books included, I don't think it had enough content to warrant it being advertised as a novel. I had hoped Nocturnal would be an exciting horror and paranormal suspense novel. However, I soon realised this was not the case. It had a predictable and basic storyline, so I struggled to feel any suspense while reading. The characters were also very one-dimensional, which made it difficult to remember who was who. It's hard to care about characters when they have no depth. With minimal character or plot development, I struggled to find something to like about this book. The only positive thing I could think of is that the basic storyline does have potential to be something readers would enjoy, but it would need a lot of work.
I would class this as a short horror story. There was no romance, but there were many erotic scenes which I found unnecessary, strange and repetitive. I wasn't sure why these were included. There was also plenty of vulgar language and gruesome violence. For these reasons, I could not recommend this book to younger or sensitive readers.
My main issue with Nocturnal was the editing. I reached my count of ten errors within 3% of the book. I stopped recording them, as I was finding errors on nearly every page. I highly doubt this was professionally edited. This was really distracting and had I not been reviewing this, I would have stopped reading within the first few chapters. The issues I found included missing speech marks, incorrect capitalisation, apostrophe misuse, typos, run-on sentences and wrong homophone usage. For example, the word “were” instead of “we're” was used. There were also multiple formatting issues such as repeated paragraphs, random indentations and line breaks. Unfortunately, the lack of editing stopped me from being immersed in the story.
The concept had promise, but it would be much better as a short story rather than a novel. At this stage, I could not recommend this book to anyone, as I really struggled to finish reading Nocturnal. There were countless errors nearly on every page. Therefore, I have to rate this 1 out of 4 stars. With some serious editing, I would increase my rating another star. There would need to be a lot more character and plot development to increase the rating further.
******
Nocturnal
View: on Bookshelves | on Amazon
1 out of 4 stars
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Professor Davis and six of his chosen students explore a cave on an uninhabited island off of Costa Rica. What should have been a month-long expedition turns into a living nightmare. The explorers find out that they are not alone on the island after all. Years ago, an island tribe used to worship a nocturnal animal. It was believed to be half-human and half-bat. When the Professor goes missing one night, along with their only method of communication with anyone off the island, his students must find him. Will they help him before it's too late? Who will survive the night?
Nocturnal by Tim W. Byrd is only 108 pages long. However, the copy I received was split into two books. The second book was titled Nocturnal Battle of the Breed. It would have been better to advertise this as a sequel or to combine them into a single book. I found this confusing, as I did not expect there to be two books when I selected this to review. Even with both books included, I don't think it had enough content to warrant it being advertised as a novel. I had hoped Nocturnal would be an exciting horror and paranormal suspense novel. However, I soon realised this was not the case. It had a predictable and basic storyline, so I struggled to feel any suspense while reading. The characters were also very one-dimensional, which made it difficult to remember who was who. It's hard to care about characters when they have no depth. With minimal character or plot development, I struggled to find something to like about this book. The only positive thing I could think of is that the basic storyline does have potential to be something readers would enjoy, but it would need a lot of work.
I would class this as a short horror story. There was no romance, but there were many erotic scenes which I found unnecessary, strange and repetitive. I wasn't sure why these were included. There was also plenty of vulgar language and gruesome violence. For these reasons, I could not recommend this book to younger or sensitive readers.
My main issue with Nocturnal was the editing. I reached my count of ten errors within 3% of the book. I stopped recording them, as I was finding errors on nearly every page. I highly doubt this was professionally edited. This was really distracting and had I not been reviewing this, I would have stopped reading within the first few chapters. The issues I found included missing speech marks, incorrect capitalisation, apostrophe misuse, typos, run-on sentences and wrong homophone usage. For example, the word “were” instead of “we're” was used. There were also multiple formatting issues such as repeated paragraphs, random indentations and line breaks. Unfortunately, the lack of editing stopped me from being immersed in the story.
The concept had promise, but it would be much better as a short story rather than a novel. At this stage, I could not recommend this book to anyone, as I really struggled to finish reading Nocturnal. There were countless errors nearly on every page. Therefore, I have to rate this 1 out of 4 stars. With some serious editing, I would increase my rating another star. There would need to be a lot more character and plot development to increase the rating further.
******
Nocturnal
View: on Bookshelves | on Amazon