Review Black Hull - How to Completely Ruin a Book with Bad Dialogue

Black Hull by Joseph A. Turkot
My rating: 1 of 5 stars

I was given this book in exchange for an honest review. I really wanted to like it. The cover was amazing. The book blurb about a man stuck on a ship being sucked into a black hole was fascinating.

Unfortunately, the book has almost nothing to do with the book blurb. That interesting lead in takes up less than a chapter before the book unravels in a random series of encounters that lead nowhere.

WHY I DIDN'T LIKE IT

My main critique of Black Hull is how it deals with dialogue. Many chapters have large, extended sections without a line of exposition, description, or dialogue markers. They are all dialogue. Not even a “he said”. This makes it very difficult for the reader to follow who is saying what. It also left me very unattached to the characters because it was difficult to create a visual image of them or the action.

For example:

Chapter 17
“At the T-Jump?”
“Yup.”
“How long?”
“Couple of days.”
“And how long after until you’ll reach Utopia?”
“I don’t know. Could be a month. I’ve got to stop off to do dad’s transfer.”
“Who’ll do that?”
“Cheapest? A droid on the West Rail Sector.”

This section goes on like this for several pages. What it’s missing is something to help the reader get a clear visual of who is saying what and what are they doing as they say it. Writers need to create a mental movie in the mind of the reader. This book fails to do that.

On a formatting note, there was no table of contents. This is a very helpful feature in ebooks and is an easy fix the author should consider.

IN CONCLUSION

I really wanted to like this book. Unfortunately, it would need a massive rewrite before I could give it anything but a one star.


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