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Length: 91 pages
Blurb:
It was a forgotten place. A place with a dark history. Thousands of men had passed through its doors during the first three-quarters of the twentieth century. Most had served their time and moved on. But not all had been so fortunate.
As the years ticked by and the seasons changed, the old prison mouldered away, but one thing stayed constant.
In the deepest part of the night, on the darkest nights of the year, particularly in spring, if you were sensitive enough to hear them, sounds could be heard coming from the deepest bowels of the lowest level basement. All was not right. Something was waiting, alone in the darkness.
Waiting for someone to finally hear its sorrow.
When Petty Officer Ben Pierce decided to explore the long abandoned Naval Prison next to his decrepit barracks, the last thing he expected to find was a mystery.
Something is in the Prison. Or is it some one? Where is the weeping coming from? When Ben follows the sounds to an ice-cold but empty cell, he isn’t sticking around to find out any more details.
But now he can’t get it out of his mind.
This story is hard to write a review about because the premise is so interesting and I don’t want to spoil the book for anyone.
This story revolves around Ben, a young officer in the navy who happens upon something that isn’t supposed to exist when he’s stationed at an old naval instalment.
There’s more than just romance at work here. There’s a history lesson as well and as much as I’d like to think that the horrible things that are depicted in the story are just figments of the authors imagination, I’m sure that it probably happened somewhere…and probably still does. Homophobia always seems to bring out the very worst in people prone to bigotry to begin with.
Ben is lucky enough to have some good friends to support him on the journey that he’s on, even if they have a hard time dealing with it at first. Ed and his wife Jen are funny and sweet most of the time and everyone should have friends like them to have their back.
Karl is Ben’s love interest in this book and he has a very different back story that you need to read to be able to get the full effect.
Like I said, I don’t want to delve too much into the story itself because I think knowing too much will spoil it for the people who haven’t read it yet. What I can say is that the idea of the story is intriguing and the author has provided us with a unique couple to cheer on to their happily ever after.
I will throw out a little warning that the first couple of chapters are hard to read. What happens to Karl is absolutely horrible and I alternated between outrage and nausea the whole time. No one deserves the treatment he receives, except maybe the monsters who are torturing Karl.
However, I did have one big problem with this book. For me, there was just too much story crammed into too few pages. I would have liked to have seen Ben struggle a little more with what was happening around him. As amazing a person as he is, I have a hard time believing that he would have accepted the strange things he was finding quite so easily.
One of the things that makes a supernatural or paranormal story so much fun to read is the anticipation of what’s going to happen next. I understand that it isn’t really meant to be a horror story in the traditional sense, I still had a hard time getting swept away because everything was happening too quickly for me.
The author does create a fantastic world for his characters though. The descriptions of the naval base and the area around it painted a picture for me that I could see in my head and it’s what helped keep me glued to the story.
I will be waiting to see what new and even more interesting ideas pop into author Daniel Mitton’s brain. He has an interesting voice as an author and while this story didn’t quite hit all my criteria, I enjoyed the ride a lot. If you’re looking for something different, give this story a shot.
RATING:
Daniel Mitton is not a statistic. When the doctors broke the news to him that he would be dead by the end of 2013 from brain cancer, he scoffed at them. He has proven them incorrect, and continues to prove them more incorrect every day.
He is now pursuing his lifelong dream of telling other people his stories in writing. His overactive imagination used to get him in trouble. It will be interesting to see what happens this time.
My Name Was Karl is his first self-published work, but he already has two other books in a queue somewhere at a publisher.
Daniel was born and raised in northern New Hampshire, but now lives in sunny Southwest Florida with his husband of nearly twenty-eight years. He totally doesn’t get why some people complain it is too hot in Florida!
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I liked this book a lot!
Congratulations on the release, Daniel. I’m really intrigued by it now, and that cover. It is just beautiful!
Good luck with the book. I love the cover as it caught my attention as being very intriguing. I will be reading this one.
Congrats on the release! Thank you for the review.
This sounds like a good read, but the low page count gives me pause. It’s a short story for sure, and the trend of late has been toward shorter and shorter books. I don’t see any benefit from that other than $, because clearly it could have and should have been expanded into something more, and something better. I’m intrigued, but will probably wait for the eventual release of an “updated and expanded” edition, which is another trend I see happening of late.
There won’t be an ‘updated and expanded’ edition on this one. It is the final edition. I have moved on to another WIP. The two I have coming out soon with Less Than Three are about 3 times this length, and the third in that series is going to be roughly the same. This one was always intended to be short, and I cut a lot of military detail out before publishing, which made it shorter than it was. In hindsight I might not do that in the future since it caused the second half to seem rushed. Thanks for your input though. 🙂