 Hello everybody, E here. Welcome back to another episode of 31 Days of Halloween. Today, we are talking about Broken Shells by Michael Patrick Hicks. Right up front, I need to let you guys know that I consider Michael a friend of mine. That's another reason why I haven't read too much of his stuff, because I know how people think that bias comes along with any time you read a friend's work with me. Especially, I tend to be harder on my friends than I am strangers. I've proved this time and time again if you've been a fan of the channel at any length of time. You will have seen me give negative reviews to people that I consider friends. This is not a negative review. This is a mostly positive review. I have one big chunk of criticism to talk about. But otherwise, it's going to be a positive review. I like the book a lot. I'm giving it four stars. I had, like I said, one big issue with it, and that's why it's not five stars. But I just want to let you guys know that up front, he's also a Patreon of mine, a supporter of mine, Patreon supporter of mine. So all that stuff up front and out of the way, let's just go ahead and jump into the review. This is another book that I bought ages ago that I just never got around to reading once again for those reasons. I tend to stay away from my friends stuff because I am hypercritical of them. With this one, I'm glad I chose to read it, but it's another ebook that I picked up. I'm trying to put a dent in my massive 3000 plus horror library on my Kindle because I just don't care too much about these ebooks. But I've spent all this money accumulating all these books on sale. That's usually why I grab them. Either they're on sale or they're just marked down cheap. They're just cheap to begin with. This book is about a young man named Antoine DeWitt, who is down on his luck. He has just gotten fired from his job. He comes home and his wife says they have a winning ticket to a dealership that is worth $5,000. He doesn't believe it. It's too good to be true, that kind of thing. His wife talks him into it and he ends up going up to the dealership to get his $5,000. The dealership is run by a man who has many, many secrets or not ran. I don't know. It's his family's dealership, but there's something beneath the dealership. Antoine is captured and he is put down into this pit where he comes across monsters. I am a huge fan of the monsters in this book. I love a good creature feature. I love a good alone in the dark feature. I love all that stuff and it just checked every box for me. I love the design of the creatures. I don't want to spoil where they supposedly came from or anything like that. Not even with the culture or the belief system or any of that stuff. I'm not sure if they actually do exist in that belief system. I'm not sure if Michael made it up himself. Either way, fantastically done. I loved every bit of that. Michael writes brutality very, very well. A plus for the brutality because people are just torn to shreds. Even the main character is so broken and abused by the end of the book. You're like, I can't believe this poor man is still going. I love it when the main character is used and abused to the point of either death or up to the point of death. I cannot harp on the creatures enough. I think they were very, very cool and very well done, utterly horrific. I love the ending. In fact, I'm really glad that my novella Fairy Lights, if you've read Broken Shells and Fairy Lights or either one of them, you'll understand where I'm going with this. I'm really glad that my novella Fairy Lights is no longer available. It was at one time, but the publisher went under and I just chose to never republish it. But I'm really glad it isn't because I don't know if Mike published his first or I published mine first, but it's pretty much the exact same ending and they are both creature features. So Mike, if you're watching this man, I didn't read your book, I promise. It's just one of those things, dude. Anyways, so I had a blast with it. I love the ending, especially the last chapter, the very last chapter. That was especially well, I was like, oh, okay, I know what's about to happen. It was cool. I like that. Now for my one complaint, and I could be wrong, but I've had people, I've talked to different experts about this thing. At one point in time, there is a camera that is watching the pits down in the dark, and it is made very clear that there is no way for the creatures to get out. They might tunnel out, so on and so forth. What I'm getting at here is there is absolutely no light source. It is cave dark in this place, but yet the night vision cameras work. And I know it's important to the story that the night vision cameras work so that they can see what's going on down there. But with absolutely no light, all night vision does is enhance light that is available. If you go down into the pits of a cave, night vision is not going to help you because there's absolutely no illumination whatsoever for it to magnify. It only magnifies light. It does not create light in this situation. That kind of took me out of the story. Now, if there is newer technology, I don't know, but the last time I researched this was about five years ago. In fact, I didn't even know about it until an editor brought it up to me in one of my stories when I wanted to use it in a cave system, and it's like, it's not going to work unless there's some kind of light down there. But that is, that's my only complaint, really, other than a handful of typographical errors. I would say I probably found 10 in a novella. That's maybe 100 pages long. And that gets a pass for me. It wasn't like one every single chapter. That's usually what I, you get like one error for per every 20, 30, no, sorry, one error per every five pages for me kind of deal. But this is more like one error every 10 pages or so. And it's just simple stuff. It's not anything that, you know, most casual readers are going to see it and they're going to keep on passing on. But there were enough that I did note them and I wanted to note them in the review. Because if I don't, people are bound to come back and go, oh my God, this thing was riddled with errors, even if they found two or three. So I'm just, I'm making, maybe making Michael aware of this. It's whatever. But oh, also I did turn in Michael, if you're interested, I don't know how they handle this, but there is a report typo error on Kindle. And I went ahead and used that for each and every one of them. So if you're sitting back cussing like, who in the world is doing it? It was me. I'm sorry. I found out later that they could possibly take the book down until you fix it. So I apologize if that happens. I didn't know it just said report content error. But anyways, so have you guys read Broken Shells by Michael Patrick Hicks? If you have, let me know down there in the doodly-doo whether or not you loved it, whether or not you hated it, whether or not you felt meh about it. But if you felt any of those things, let me know why so that we can have a discussion. But until next time, I have been E, you have been U. This has been another episode of 31 Days of Halloween. I'll talk to you guys later. Bye-bye.