babsen

A cash grab; no "love" went into this audiobook

Revisado: 04-05-25

I've read a ton of Aron Beauregard's horror, so I generally know what to expect. Going in, I knew this wasn't going to be some deep literary work that explores the human condition. Still, this was a massive letdown.

First thing's first, I'm actually shocked at the narration performance. Not because the narrator is bad, he did a fine enough job, but because there's multiple recording errors. There are multiple times when the narrator reads a line, coughs/stumbles, and then goes back and re-reads the same exact line. This isn't a long audiobook either, so it's inexcusable that no one caught this. If Brandon Perras-Sanchez or Aron Beauregard had listened to this a single time before uploading it to audible, they'd have immediately noticed. So there's only two possibilities; they didn't care enough to spend less than 3 hours listening to the audiobook before publishing it, or they listened to it and just didn't care about the errors.

Regarding the story itself, there's really not much here. If you read the brief summary in the description of the audiobook, you pretty much know everything that happens. A captain assembles a crew to deliver some mysterious cargo for a ton of money, and then things slowly begin to go wrong on the voyage. This is a fantastic setup! Unfortunately... That's it. None of the characters really do anything at all during the course of the story.

Once the "bad things" start to happen, the rest of the story is, essentially, the entire cast of characters being miserable and hungry until they're quickly/brutally dispatched one by one. No one really does anything. They all just kinda wait around to die.

When the "end credits" begin to roll, I actually said "That's it?" I pulled out my phone and went back a couple minutes to see if I'd missed something. Turns out, nope. The story just comes to a close with a whimper.

So... yeah. Don't waste your money or audible credits.

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Audio quality is horrible

Revisado: 01-03-24

I'm sorry. I can't even finish this title because each time the narrator gets excited, the audio cuts out because his microphone short circuits when there's too much volume. The narration is so insanely choppy in sections that half the narration gets completely cut off.

Like... It's genuinely appalling that the author/publisher listened to this file and were like "yeah... this is good enough to sell to people."

As for the story itself: I saw someone online recommend this because it was "more than just splatterpunk." I love me some splatterpunk. I love gnarly stories. 90 Minutes into Blender Babies, it's just "meh." Maybe it gets better later, but the prose itself is mediocre and the characters just don't make sense.

For example: There's a mother with her kids in a room where a bunch of people are talking about disgusting stuff. She's like "Hey, don't say nasty things around my kid." Then she proceeds to wait around while everyone just... keeps escalating and talking about gross stuff, and then when the author remembered there were children in the scene, the mom suddenly is like "okay that's too far, we're leaving."

The characters lack authenticity. The premise could have been interesting, but the author just handwaves the logistics of it rather than flesh out HOW the world fell into chaos, or WHY this new drug caught on. I know. Maybe I'm expecting too much from a novel called BLENDER BABIES. But c'mon. If you're going to have a wild premise, at least make it interesting.

If the audio ever gets fixed, I'll give this another shot. But until then, it's literally painful to listen to.

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An extreme(ly bad) novella

Revisado: 11-24-23

I'm a fan of extreme horror novels/novellas, so this isn't about the content of the story.

"Violence on the Meek" is basically 3 hours of poorly written snuff that's only guaranteed to shock people who haven't read extreme horror, while simultaneously boring those of us who have.

Here is how every single scene unfolds, written in the style of this book: "I look at <insert victim here> and I feel disgust because they are a maggot. Then, I <insert graphic violence here>."

The victims in the story aren't even 2 dimensional. Every character that crosses paths with the narrator is functionally identical, has identical reactions, and behaves so mind-numbingly stupid (because if any of these characters had a rational reaction, there wouldn't be a book), that by the 20% mark you effectively know the outcome of every single scene. I could possibly look past this if the scenes themselves were entertaining to read, but it's so poorly written.

Half the sentences are written in the passive voice, and every emotion the narrator feels is "told" to us rather than shown. The narrator "hates" humanity, but nothing about the prose gives us any idea why. A picture is never painted to "show" us his disdain in real time. There's just a loop of the main character encountering someone, him telling us how he feels, then he does something terrible, then he says life is pointless, and we move aimlessly to the next chapter.

Around the halfway mark, the loop gets shaken up a little bit when some new antagonists enter the picture and for a moment I thought "okay, perhaps this is what will drive the plot to its conclusion." Nope. I was wrong. These new characters fall into the same predictable loop and before long they're just another inconsequential bump in the narrative.

Basically, this story is one giant non-sequitur. Each scene of violence and depravity seemingly happens in a vacuum, with only the most superficial of consequences. The best example of this is the main character killing some random characters, hiding out for several years, and then stumbling across relatives of his victims who are out for revenge... But who admitted to knowing about the killings yet did absolutely nothing for literal years because... No reason. They just... didn't do anything until the main character stumbled across them accidentally.

Or, the main character shoots someone in the middle of a neighborhood and he manages to just... hide right next door for hours without anyone investigating. Why does no one investigate? Why do the cops not show up and lock down the crime scene? Well, because that would interfere with what the main character does hours later, which is return to the crime scene to surprise the victim's family with even more depraved violence.

The author doesn't understand, or doesn't care, that without compelling characters and well written prose, even the most repulsive descriptions of violence fall flat. Without any build up to the violence, there's no payoff. There's no revulsion. It's just gross words on a page that made me shrug.

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Narration is keeping me from finishing

Revisado: 06-15-22

The narration of this novel is truly terrible. I honestly thought it was some kind of weird text-to-voice computer generated speech, but it's actually a human being that sounds like he's reading a single word at a time. Bizarre starts and stops plague this audiobook.

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Horribly Written

Revisado: 09-12-21

I was looking for some extreme horror, so I decided to give this one a try based on a website recommendation. I had to stop around 2 hours in because this is just a bad book. The prose is so utterly bland that all the horrific subject matter just falls flat. Each paragraph goes like this: "John heard a noise behind him, so he turned around. There was a man there with a knife. John picked up his own knife. He swung it, but missed. So he swung again." The author just flatly narrates every single sequence in such a boring matter of fact way. This is the worst audiobook I've ever purchased.

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Too little plot spread over too much story

Revisado: 09-05-21

If you're looking for a gnarly story with lots of exploitative gore, you might enjoy this. I say "might" because this is only an "okay at best" story. I won't spoil the plot too much, but the first half is relative standard character building and the second half is a slog to get through. 50% of the book is an extended torture sequence with zero forward momentum from the plot, which could have worked if each interaction wasn't essentially a copy/paste of the one before. Shocking thing happens, narrator thinks "this is horrible," pass out, repeat. Do this over and over until the end of the book. There were sequences that should've been more horrifying, but it felt like the author themself was getting tired of the book and practically fastforwarded through some of the more grisly scenes.

I think what's even more infuriating is that the other set up an intriguing question that I thought was going to have immense payoff. One final hook that would've been a guaranteed "oh crap, that's awful," but apparently I gave him too much credit. The plot twist I thought he was leading up to didn't actually make an appearance.

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Existential Horror

Revisado: 10-22-20

With a purposefully vague narrative, I can't stop looking for answers in this horrific story.

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Sub par story; legitimately bad performance

Revisado: 05-19-18

Headline says it all. The story begins with a good premise and a nice slow buildup, but then it just becomes a slog. It isn't helped by the really bad narration; all the characters are narrated the same way, perspectives are narrated the same way. At around the halfway mark, the narration just becomes monotonous. It's only 5.5 hours long and I still couldn't get through it.

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Decent story and good performance

Revisado: 02-01-16

Is there anything you would change about this book?

If I could change something about the book, I'd get an editor to come in and trim down the overuse of similes (seriously, if you get this book, count the number of times the author describes human skin as paper-like).

Would you recommend The Troop to your friends? Why or why not?

Sure. If you're looking for a fun thriller, The Troop will definitely scratch that itch for you.

What about Corey Brill’s performance did you like?

Corey Brill is a solid narrator; I'll definitely remember his performance.

If this book were a movie would you go see it?

If this book were a movie, I'd definitely go see it. It would be lots of good, squirmy fun.

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