 Hang around to the end of the video for your chance to win a hardcover copy of The Whisperman by Alex North. Hello everybody, E here. Welcome back to another book review. Today we are doing another book from my buddy Todd Kiesling. If you have been a member of the channel or watched my review of Devil's Creek, you'll know I absolutely love that one. I called it the Horror Event of the Decade. Well, this one I did not love as much. Right off the bat, like I said, Todd is a friend of mine. I consider him a close friend. He's even worked on some of my books, doing formatting, design, that kind of thing. So just telling you all that up front, this is one of those occasions where I have to be critical of my peers. So today we're talking about the final reconciliation. This one is about a band called The Yellow Kings, and I had no idea The Yellow Kings mentioned in Devil's Creek tied into this. I had no idea that's where it was from. I thought that was cool. You know, I'm a Stephen King fanboy, so I love, you know, interconnected worlds, that kind of thing. With this one, I want to talk about the stuff that I didn't like first. The three things that I look for in horror is character, pacing, and dread. The pacing and the dread here on point, that's why I'm going to give it three stars. But the characters are sorely lacking, and I'm going to compare this to something else just to get my point across. In Daisy Jones and The Six, a book that I gave five stars to, the character development for the band was off the charts. I felt like each and every person had their own distinct voice, and in this one, I didn't get that whatsoever. In fact, I confused one character with two people. I thought there was a keyboardist and a drummer. There was not. There was a keyboardist, or there's a drummer who also played keyboards. That's how lacking I feel that the character development was, because I'm a pretty close reader, and I probably should have caught, because this explained right there on the page. I went back and saw the first time they introduced that kind of thing. What's there is just, the characters were so forgettable, I was like, okay, so each and every single person has their own thing. You got the guitar player, you got the singer, you have the bass player, then you have the drummer and the keyboardist. I thought it was a five piece. It wasn't a five piece, it was a four piece. So that's my criticism. There's absolutely nothing here that helps you to get to know these characters before the bad things start to happen. The only thing that we see is their reaction to the bad stuff happening, and that's fine. But I need to know these characters. I need to know something about them to actually feel for them to actually care about them. But with this one, I didn't get that. Now if you saw the beginning of the video, this is where I'm going to stop through a review for a second, and I'm going to tell you guys, if you want to win a copy of The Whisper Man, give me the time signature that you saw this, and email that to me at Edward Lorne, that's L-O-R-N Edward Lorne, the name of this channel, at gmail.com. Email me the time signature and I will send you a copy of the book. Back to the review. There's a whole lot of good stuff going on in here. That's why I'm going to give it three stars. The writing's impeccable, as always. I absolutely love Todd's writing, and this is just as good as anything that he writes. He has a very polished style, and from watching his live streams, him writing during NaNo Rhymo, I've seen why it's so published. He cleans up as he goes. I do not. We're two completely different writers. When I respect his attention to detail, I respect his writing, terrific, terrific writing. The dread, you know, you feel like something's going to happen. There's even a little sprint, what I call the Stephen King foreshadowing, where he tells you outright that something is going to happen to a character, you just don't know how it's going to happen to that character. He does this very early on, like one character, well, I don't want to spoil anything, but it has to do with a face. He tells you very early on it's going to happen, and you have to wonder throughout the entire book how that's going to happen to that character, and I thought all the payoffs were terrific. The final, the ending, great. There is a twist at the end that was kind of, I mean, it had to go that way, as far as I'm concerned. The very last bit of the book, I was looking forward to that happening, and it did happen. But a story like this, I feel, has to end that way. The pacing was also another one. This is only, what, 150 pages? In fact, I think it's quite a bit shorter, because there's some where it's just stuff like this. It's just pictures. There's quite a bit of that also. Probably around 130 pages of actual book here. But it's worth every penny for what Todd's charging for it. I don't know if he has any more of these websites, and I'm not sure if this is still available from Crystal Lake Publishing or not. I'm not sure. If it is, I will link to you down there in the doobly-doo. The pacing, it goes by very, very quickly, and the book is a lot of fun. It's a lot of horror fun. You're not going to get to a point where you go, I wish something would happen. There's something happening throughout, and we're going back to that dread. It's just a mounting dread as this stuff is happening. You just want to know what's going on. If I had known the characters better, this would be a damn near perfect experience, which is lovely to me, because this is one of Todd's earlier books, and I can see the growth from this book to Devil's Creek. It's an insane growth. There's so much character, so much, and so many characters in Devil's Creek, and they all felt unique and real and flesh and blood, and you love them or hated them, whatever. In this one, I didn't love or hate anybody. It was just like watching a slasher film, one of the early ones that had absolutely no character development whatsoever. Well, I guess most slasher's don't, period. This one felt like that. It's just a bunch of, I guess you want to say red shirts with one Captain Kirk character. That's what this book felt like. I like the structure of the book also. I need to throw that out there. I've always been a fan of structures like this. I did it in my book, Bay's End. It's a circular narrative. I guess, no, it's a framing narrative. I'm not sure what it is called, but I do like the structure of a book. So at the end of the day, I'm going to give this three stars. Have you read the final Reconciliation by Todd Kiesling? If you have, let me know whether or not you loved it, or hated it down there in the doobly-doo. Let me know why you loved it or hated it so that we can have a discussion. But until next time, I have an E. You have an U. This has been another book review. I'll talk to you guys later. Bye-bye.