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lanfearious's review against another edition
5.0
An enjoyable 3 hour read. The story focused around Daisy Walker and 3 other newly introduced characters. If you have read the AH Novella’s prior. You will be rewarded with some cameo appearances from other protagonists from the books. It was fun to piece together the different back stories of the side characters.
honorbound13's review against another edition
5.0
The author has a commanding grasp of both the Cthulhu mythos and the world of Arkham horror. The author combined those settings into a compelling story told through multiple perspectives that came together at the end that feel as if they should have been obvious from the start but weren’t. The descriptions of the locations of the Cthulhu mythos were particularly captivating, and felt akin to Lovecraft.
qheretic's review against another edition
3.0
I picked up Dance of the Damned after deliberately searching for Arkham Horror books that feature investigator Daisy Walker and was initially delighted by the fact that she was on the cover of the book and this being her debut in the board games novel series. Daisy is a favored investigator of mind so I jumped at the chance of reading an author's take on her character and delving into some RP-esque backstory on her.
Chapter one opens to Daisy, a promising start for me, and the author's balance of dialogue and narration was a good start to the book. I felt like I was getting a good deal of background to get me situated and some dialogue to keep things fresh and moving along in terms of action. But, rather quickly, there is a scene and perspective change to a new character. Then another after a little bit of time with Annabel to Tony Morgan, another investigator in the Arkham Horror series.
Though I liked the book, this became one of its biggest flaws for me. Early on, the reader is quickly thrust into the perspective of three characters after quickly getting situated with what's going on with them. At this point, it isn't done badly, but it is a bit brusque.
By the end of the book,though, we are given the perspective of Daisy, Tony, Annabel, a homeless man, a detective, a minor but important character known as the old man, and the primary "antagonist." That's a total of seven characters to follow each with multiple instances of PoV swaps. By the middle of the book, it was jarring and I met POV changes with disdain and wanted to put the book down to take a break because I felt what I described to my roommate as "mentally nauseous."
It unfortunately became so distracting that it broke the narrative flow for me, making the book that much more of a chore than an entertainment. The PoV swaps are also unbalanced later in the book, so you might spend a long time with a character, swap to another for a short moment, swap back, and then swap to someone else. This was the case with Detective Heskell at the Falling Angel.
The second of the major flaws, I'm just going to put it this way: not everyone is meant to imitate HP Lovecraft's style. In fact, even Lovecraft got a little carried away sometimes waxing prosaically. It seemed like Bligh tried after the second chapter to imitate this but his sentences were incredibly bogged down. I would read his narration, and they would go on for so long that I lost the point of action. He sometimes would do this during scenes specifically meant to be action scenes, going into elaborate detail about everything during a scene that was supposed to be fast paced because it was hazardous to the characters.
The ending with Tony in the car and Daisy trying to come to terms with the climatic cress though seemed to balance itself back out, still suffering from the second flaw at points but not so much the first. It actually felt for a moment like I was watching a focused player in an RP try to figure out how they were going to fix the problem at hand. I think it was the ending really that pushed me from rating this a 2/2.5 and going full on to 3 stars.
Though the book slogged at points and I would become disenchanted with PoV swaps more often than not, the story is compelling, a good jaunt into the dark horror/fantasy that is so arresting about the Arkham/Eldritch Horror series.
3 out of 5 stars.
Chapter one opens to Daisy, a promising start for me, and the author's balance of dialogue and narration was a good start to the book. I felt like I was getting a good deal of background to get me situated and some dialogue to keep things fresh and moving along in terms of action. But, rather quickly, there is a scene and perspective change to a new character. Then another after a little bit of time with Annabel to Tony Morgan, another investigator in the Arkham Horror series.
Though I liked the book, this became one of its biggest flaws for me. Early on, the reader is quickly thrust into the perspective of three characters after quickly getting situated with what's going on with them. At this point, it isn't done badly, but it is a bit brusque.
By the end of the book,though, we are given the perspective of Daisy, Tony, Annabel, a homeless man, a detective, a minor but important character known as the old man, and the primary "antagonist." That's a total of seven characters to follow each with multiple instances of PoV swaps. By the middle of the book, it was jarring and I met POV changes with disdain and wanted to put the book down to take a break because I felt what I described to my roommate as "mentally nauseous."
It unfortunately became so distracting that it broke the narrative flow for me, making the book that much more of a chore than an entertainment. The PoV swaps are also unbalanced later in the book, so you might spend a long time with a character, swap to another for a short moment, swap back, and then swap to someone else. This was the case with Detective Heskell at the Falling Angel.
The second of the major flaws, I'm just going to put it this way: not everyone is meant to imitate HP Lovecraft's style. In fact, even Lovecraft got a little carried away sometimes waxing prosaically. It seemed like Bligh tried after the second chapter to imitate this but his sentences were incredibly bogged down. I would read his narration, and they would go on for so long that I lost the point of action. He sometimes would do this during scenes specifically meant to be action scenes, going into elaborate detail about everything during a scene that was supposed to be fast paced because it was hazardous to the characters.
The ending with Tony in the car and Daisy trying to come to terms with the climatic cress though seemed to balance itself back out, still suffering from the second flaw at points but not so much the first. It actually felt for a moment like I was watching a focused player in an RP try to figure out how they were going to fix the problem at hand. I think it was the ending really that pushed me from rating this a 2/2.5 and going full on to 3 stars.
Though the book slogged at points and I would become disenchanted with PoV swaps more often than not, the story is compelling, a good jaunt into the dark horror/fantasy that is so arresting about the Arkham/Eldritch Horror series.
3 out of 5 stars.
verkisto's review against another edition
2.0
This is probably more a 1.5-star book (a book has to be truly horrible in one way or another to justify a one-star rating from me), but if I could make it, say, 1.1, I'd probably use that, instead. Dance of the Damned just isn't very good.
Bligh's style is awkward; there was at least one sentence on every page that was structured in such a way that I had to stop to parse it into something I could understand. There were comma splices and run-on sentences, too (and a few typos, but I can't blame him for what a copy editor should have caught), and the end result was difficult to read. As such, I started checking out along the way, and I'd find myself having read ten to twenty pages, realizing I had no idea what happened during that span of the story. By the end, it all sort of meshed together, but I didn't have the kind of connection to the characters I needed to make me care about it.
The next two books in the series have another author involved, so I'll see if this series improves.
Bligh's style is awkward; there was at least one sentence on every page that was structured in such a way that I had to stop to parse it into something I could understand. There were comma splices and run-on sentences, too (and a few typos, but I can't blame him for what a copy editor should have caught), and the end result was difficult to read. As such, I started checking out along the way, and I'd find myself having read ten to twenty pages, realizing I had no idea what happened during that span of the story. By the end, it all sort of meshed together, but I didn't have the kind of connection to the characters I needed to make me care about it.
The next two books in the series have another author involved, so I'll see if this series improves.
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