Thursday, 9 April 2015

Graveyard Shift, by Angela Roquet

1 star


Lana is a Reaper, living in Limbo City, making a living collecting souls on their deaths and delivering them to whatever Afterlife suits them best - it turns out that all religions were sorta right, you see, and so their believers are simply measured against their own beliefs before being ferried on to Heaven/Hell/Nirvana/Summerland etc. Unless they're unbelievers, in which case they're thrown into the Sea of Eternity. 


Despite not being a very good Reaper - she breaks rules, is insubordinate, lazy and generally a pain in the ass - Lana has somehow just been given a promotion. Grim, the boss of the Reapers, wants her to head a crew looking for a particularly special soul who can hold Eternity together.

This initially appealed to me because of its ideas, but unfortunately fell flat in the telling. We jump from plot point to plot point with most of the contents feeling like ideas for scenes and characters not yet fleshed out, and neither the relationships (be they the apparently romantic one that springs up between Lana and an angel she supposedly despises, or those with her friends and peers) nor the plot points felt remotely organic but simply appeared because Roquet wanted them to. Description wasn't a strong suit either, so I was left with only a vague sense of what this world looked and felt like, what happened in the battles that frequently kicked off, and no clue whatsoever why both Lana and the soul she was looking for were so ruddy bloody special.


On the plus side, this was free...



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