Book Review: Sleepers by Stephen Landry

The cover for this book was taken from its Amazon buy page for review purposes under Fair Use doctrine.  

Spoiler Free Summary:  Sleepers by Stephen Landry is the prequel story to the Convergence saga. When the demons arrived, two-thirds of Earth’s population remained asleep while others were changed. They had powers. The government formed them into a fighting force, and eventually, they headed for their ship, determined to take them down.

 

Character:  The super heroes were sympathetic characters. I remember a guy who collected some ninja swords. I remember the couple (one sleeping, one not). They were compelling characters with authentic motivation. The main character was just trying to assure the loved ones were safe while they slept. Now, it’s been quite some time since I’ve read this book, so I don’t hold it against the author that I can’t remember names (or even genders).  That’s just time taking it’s toll. For instance I can’t name every character on Wheel of Time. Sure, Rand and the gang, but they are characters from my favorite series. So please just trust me when I say these characters were fun to read about.

Exposition: This story was told in an odd sort of “love letter” first-person perspective. There are interludes of another character as well. This probably had more exposition than I wanted (and that’s accounting for first-person), but it wasn’t nightmarishly long. What did slow the book down (one of two major issues) is the location of that  exposition.  The first part of the book is a history lesson. It took a good bit of time to get into the meat of the story. I would have been much happier if the author had started me in with all the wonderful action and cool super hero stuff and then woven the background in a bit after I’d had a chance to enjoy the fun.

This image of Landry was taken from his Amazon buy page for review purposes under Fair Use doctrine.

Dialogue: This wasn’t the best, but Landry’s gift is in his creativeness and conceptualization. I’ve seen more wooden dialogue, but this had some pretty clunky, exposition-filled conversations that slowed things down.

 

Description:  This was good, particularly in the action scenes. Landry has a gift for fight sequences, and I think the fight scenes were second only to his idea for this series.

World Building: This is another area of strength for Landry. I could tell he put a lot of effort in the the outline and concept. This story would be an amazing comic book script. It’s very visual and well thought out. The design of the plot is good and the scope of the universe is interesting.

A Note on Proof Reading:  I don’t normally post about this. First, I’ve been called out on some pretty silly things, and I feel bad about those, but I must say this book had a great many grammatical and word-choice errors.  It was honestly quite distracting. Frankly, this is a wonderful idea with decent prose that is seriously brought down by the sheer number of issues per page. If Landry simply pays a good proofreader and copy-editor, this book will go from unfortunate to pretty darn good. The story really is interesting. The concept is fascinating, but I had a lot of trouble getting through it for this issue. Again, I’m not perfect, and if anyone were to call me out, I don’t know how well I’d hold up.  This is one reason why I don’t usually review this area of writing. However, given just how many issues there were, I’d be letting potential readers down if I spoke only of the things I liked (and like I said, there are a great many), and ignored something any reader would easily notice.

Overall: This was a great concept with fascinating world building and cool action sequences. It’s cinematic in its visuals, and the story is supported by reasonably sympathetic characters. The story was brought down by grammatical errors and some heavy exposition, but it has a lot of merit as a concept and story. 

Thanks for reading

Matt