Genre: Absurdist
Fiction
Description:
“One More for the Ditch is a savage, darkly comic triptych about
collapse, cancellation, and the violent search for meaning in a culture
addicted to outrage. Moving between addiction, grief, satire, and rebellion,
the book asks what, if anything, is worth worshiping when institutions fail,
morality fractures, and survival itself becomes an act of defiance.”
Author:
Information about the author is limited, but this appears to be his
first full length book with short stories being featured in multiple venues
prior. He has a substack site that you can check out if you’d like.
Appraisal:
I feel like I could write a novel on my reactions about this book
which range from the extremely negative to the extremely positive. I’ll try to
cut my review down to at least novella length or even a short story. We’ll see
how I do.
About fifteen years ago when I first started writing reviews of most
of the books I read, focusing on indie (both self-published and extremely small
press) publications that were starting to get attention among Kindle owners,
one of the claims I saw from my fellow readers was that the proofreading was
lacking in these books. While it wasn’t unusual to see a handful of proofing
misses in a book, even those published by the large traditional publishers, I
didn’t often see serious issues regardless of how they were published, but
sometimes it happened. I came up with a threshold of a number of errors I
needed to flag while reading a book where I would mention that it had proofing
issues and an even higher number where I would start deducting stars based on
the proofing misses. This book exceeded that second threshold by more than 4
times and of the close to a thousand books I’ve gauged using this criteria this
has, by far, the worst proofreading of any. In fact, it feels like the book
could have been written using speech to text and then the generated text was
published without even looking at it based on a lot of the errors I saw, like
constantly confusing the words passed and past or saying shes instead of she’s
with apostrophes missing from words where they should be. If this kind of thing
bothers you, this book will drive you crazy.
The content itself, if you ignore the above, I liked much better. The
title says it is a “triptych” which is usually used for a work of art that has
three pieces. This has three parts to it with different sections that are
different, yet still tie together in many ways. Amazon has this classified as
absurdist fiction which Wikipedia describes by saying that “common elements in
absurdist fiction include satire, dark humor, incongruity, the abasement of
reason, and controversy regarding the philosophical condition of being ‘nothing’.”
That gives a pretty good idea of the story (okay, make that stories) that
you’ll find here. In some ways it felt dystopian, but felt like it was showing
us what today’s world could be headed for if we continue on our current path. I
love books that get me thinking and looking at the world from different angles.
This does that. If I wasn’t constantly having to interpret and correct in my
head for all the proofing issues, I’d have enjoyed it a whole lot more.
Buy now
from: Amazon US Amazon UK
FYI:
Some adult language
Format/Typo
Issues:
Proofreading, if it happened, was atrocious as discussed in the
appraisal section.
Rating: **
Two Stars
Reviewed
by: BigAl
Approximate word count: 75-80,000 words
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