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Oli Jacobs – Filmic Cuts: Sunshine and Lollipops | Review

Title: Filmic Cuts: Sunshine and Lollipops

Author: Oli Jacobs

Type: Fiction

Page Count/Review Word Count: 172

Rating: 4/5

I’ve been on an Oli Jacobs hype of late, working my way through as much of his back catalogue as I can track down. He’s a local author (we both live in High Wycombe, and he even has a book out called Strange Days in High Wycombe), and he’s also an indie, so it’s nice to show some support.

I’m not going to pretend that this book is faultless. The layout is a little weird with no justification, spacing between paragraphs and no page numbers, and there are also occasional grammar mistakes including one memorable “their” versus “there” error. But as long as you can get past that, you’re in for a good time.

The stories were great, and each one of them was memorable, which I find is a rarity for a collection of short stories. Jacobs makes for a great short story writer.

Click here to buy Filmic Cuts: Sunshine and Lollipops.

Todd Wittenmyer – The Vulnerable Gods | Review

Title: The Vulnerable Gods

Author: Todd Wittenmyer

Type: Fiction

Page Count/Review Word Count: 349

Rating: 3.5*/5

Todd Wittenmyer – The Vulnerable Gods

I have kind of mixed feelings about this book because while the story line itself is pretty gripping and keeps you turning the pages, there are so many spelling and grammar mistakes that it’s difficult to overlook them. We’re talking the wrong versions of to/too, your/you’re and its/it’s all throughout the book. And the layout is messed up as well, with double spacing, random blank pages and weird page numbers that seem to appear and disappear.

Of course, this is par for the course with an indie novel to a certain extent, and I was prepared to overlook them because Todd is a BookTube friend of mine. But at the same time, I do think that the book would be much, much better if it was copy edited and proofread and then properly typeset.

But now that we’ve got the negatives out of the way, let’s move on to the positives. One of the things that I enjoyed the most was the fact that you can see the author’s personality coming across in the book, and you can also see how he’s inspired by Stephen King. But it doesn’t feel derivative, and in fact it’s kind of difficult to actually classify the genre of this book because it takes inspiration from a bunch of different genres and brings them together into something new.

All in all then, I am glad that I read this, but it also felt incomplete. I feel as though Todd is selling himself short here, and it’s just a shame that it hasn’t been better proofed before he hit the publish button. I can’t really recommend it in its current state because of the mistakes, but I do think there’s a lot of potential there. I’d say it’s a good 80-90% of the way towards being a pretty good indie release, but without the corrections it’s a bit like going to see a decent band who are being held back by a bad sound guy.