Monday 1 February 2016

REVIEW: Jason Parent - Unseemly

Genre: Horror
Publisher: Corpus Press
Publication Date: 25th Jan 2016
Pages: 48

MY REVIEW:

A copy of Unseemly by Jason Parent, was sent to Confessions of a Reviewer by the publisher, Corpus Press in exchange for an honest review. This is said review.

So it’s no secret that Jason Parent takes up space on my bookshelf. I think anyone who doesn’t have him on their shelf is quite frankly either a bit stupid, or plainly haven’t discovered him yet. If you are the first, then fix it. If you are the second, then fix it.

I was very pleased when I was asked to review this one. I would have gotten it anyway but I always consider it a privilege to be asked to review Jason’s stuff.

This is what I thought.

Peter Callum has had a pretty shady past which he is trying very hard to leave behind him. An ex-wife, and her money demands however, mean he is considering teaming up with an old acquaintance, Dervish, for one more scheme.

The money maker.

Along with a professor McCoy and a gentleman he doesn’t really care for, Corbin, they are going hunting. Hunting for something Dervish is convinced exists and can make them very rich. Something that Peter thinks cannot possibly exist.

What does exist is nothing like they were expecting. It’s not the kind faerie they were looking for!

This is a short story so the review may be a little shorter than normal. Coming in at about fifty pages, you will whizz through this one. It’s one to slot in between books when you have a couple of hours to fill.

Characters in this one are made up of the four hunters and a few on the side-lines. Peter is a man living in a world of regret. He wants to keep on the straight and narrow but, finances just don’t allow it. He seems a decent guy. Dervish seems like a nasty Indiana Jones. Always on the lookout for the money making artefact or building but doesn’t really care how he gets it. Corbin just seems to be a nasty piece of work only interested in insults and cash. Professor McCoy wants to believe that his suspicions are correct and he is finally going to find what he has been looking for all his life. He is definitely the naïve type.

The island folk on the fringes of this story strike me as a bit weird. They know more than they are letting on and are definitely a bit cagier than they should be.

What could they be hiding?

The plot? Treasure hunters and money grabbers, chasing an age old fantasy, reach a remote Scottish island in the hope of hitting the big payday. Nothing strange in that I hear you say and to be honest with, you for the first half of this book I didn’t think there was anything strange about it either.

I was reading it thinking, it is definitely Jason Parent’s style. It has little snippets of his humour in it. It just seems to be trotting along quite nicely though. What is going to happen? Now to be fair, this was the first half of the book which in a short is about twenty-five pages, but still, normally with a Jason Parent story I am covered in goose bumps by this stage. Hmmm, is it just a slow build up to a killer ending?

You bet your feckin life it is!

You sort of know where the story in this is going. You know what the main characters are after and want out of the story so you sort of know what to expect, and what to expect to come round the corner so to speak.

WRONG!!

The second half of this book is fantastic. Again for me not atypical Jason Parent but my god I don’t care! This took off in a completely unexpected, but very welcomed direction. Instead of, for me, the lovely serene world of fantastical fairy tales and jolly, happy, mystical beings, you get quite literally dragged into an underground world of sheer horror and terrors like no man should ever have to face. This proves to me again that Mr Parent has an imagination so diverse and extreme at times that he can write anything and make it good.

When I finished this book I was left wondering why the slow start but then spent two hours visualising the absolute hell of the second part of the story. This is like a football game (soccer for you American types) of two very different halves. The second half is worth the ticket price alone!

To summarise: a short story from the wonderful imagination of Jason Parent. A slow starter (don’t give up on it) that totally explodes in the second half to completely rip apart your thoughts, expectations and imaginations of faerie tales!


General rating:

★★★★ faster first half would have got full 5!

Horror rating:

★★★★ as above.


If you would like to help support Confessions of a Reviewer, then please consider using the links below to buy Unseemly or any other books from Jason. This not only supports me but also lets me know how many people actually like to buy books after reading my reviews.

Thanks.




Book Synopsis:

Some discoveries are better left unmade.

Peter thought he was done with grave robbing, but when a former business partner lures him out to Dungarradh, a small Scottish island with a big secret, he finds himself waist deep in more than local folklore. Is the disappearance of his teammate truly the work of the legendary fae, or is a sinister force at play?

A brand-new tale of dark fantasy and horror, from the bestselling author of
WHAT HIDES WITHIN and SEEING EVIL.


In his head, Jason Parent lives in many places, but in the real world, he calls New England his home. The region offers an abundance of settings for his writing and many wonderful places in which to write them. He currently resides in Southeastern Massachusetts with his cuddly corgi named Calypso.

In a prior life, Jason spent most of his time in front of a judge . . . as a civil litigator. When he finally tired of Latin phrases no one knew how to pronounce and explaining to people that real lawsuits are not started, tried and finalized within the 60-minute timeframe they see on TV (it's harassing the witness; no one throws vicious woodland creatures at them), he traded in his cheap suits for flip flops and designer stubble. The flops got repossessed the next day, and he's back in the legal field . . . sorta. But that's another story.

When he's not working, Jason likes to kayak, catch a movie, travel any place that will let him enter, and play just about any sport (except that ball tied to the pole thing where you basically just whack the ball until it twists in on knot or takes somebody's head off - he misses the appeal). And read and write, of course. He does that too sometimes.

And for more about Jason, visit his site or find him on social media:


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