Review: How to Succeed in Life by Wol-vriey

 

Genre: Horror/LGBT

Description:

“Unlock success… at the cost of your soul.

Grady Burke was delivering a pizza when he found the evil book. Or more accurately, when the evil book found him.

Which was really very unfortunate for Grady and his family and friends and his employers.

Grady lived at home with his transgender older sister Kayla, who filmed internet porn in her bedroom, and his father Tommy, who laundered money for the Boston mob.

Now, Grady Burke wasn't exactly a loser or a slacker, he was just supremely unmotivated.

So, maybe the evil book had decided Grady needed motivating.

The evil book was titled: How to Succeed in Life.

And when, very soon, people around Grady began dying in gruesome and incredible ways, Grady and those closest to him were caught in a race against time to work out exactly how one succeeded in life without getting murdered, mauled, and mutilated by macabre monstrous forces in the process.

How to Succeed in Life folks: The world’s most deadly self-help manual.”

Author:

“Wol-vriey is Nigerian and quite tall.

He writes horror fiction—for adults only, please. And also some surrealist stuff.

To date, he has published over twenty novels in both genres.”

Appraisal:

I can’t claim to be a big fan of horror books, but like to give most genres a try once in a while when I find a book outside my norm that has something that draws me in. This one, the title was part of what did that. If it was a self help book I’d have seen it as a cliché title, but for horror it isn’t what you’d expect. The wide variety of people featured in the story, what happens to them, and figuring out how it is all going to shake out and (hopefully) end kept me engrossed the whole way. My only real complaint is that while it didn’t quite reach the level where I’d knock off stars to my ranking, there were enough proofing misses that snuck into the final book that I found myself getting knocked out of the story more often than I’d like. If you can overlook that and are interested in a strange twist on horror, this might be the book for you.

Buy now from:            Amazon US        Amazon UK

FYI:

As the author indicates in his bio, his books are for adults only. This book contains lots of adult content and language. Some adults might want to stay away from his books too. If you’re one, I’m sure you know that.

Format/Typo Issues:

More issues than I like to see with proofing misses, but came just short of the point where I would deduct stars from my ranking for these issues. Most of the problems are sentences or phrases that seemed like they were missing a word. For example “she replied me …” where it felt to me like it should have said “she replied to me” and was missing the “to.”

Rating: **** Four Stars

Reviewed by: BigAl

Approximate word count: 55-60,000 words