Scan barcode
A review by alexampersand
Night of the Living Rerun by Arthur Byron Cover
3.0
I feel like this book had an interesting story idea, but it was pretty badly executed and written. It starts with a few very detailed dream sequences that felt unnecessarily long, followed by Buffy giving an incredibly clunky and unnatural exposition dump to Willow about the Salem Witch Trials. There's then another clunky exposition dump by another character about halfway through the book.
But between the exposition dumps and the unnecessarily long dream sequences, I do actually think the idea of Salem inhabitants possessing people in the present day is a fun concept, so it gets 3 stars for that.
Unfortunately, the ending also feels pretty anticlimactic, and ultimately just comes down tothrowing one knife at someone and suddenly everything disappears. Also maybe I skimmed over it but I feel like the zombies are just... not mentioned again, no idea where they went or what happened to them? lol
Other irksome things that might just be me being petty: several times the term 'pocketbook' was used, and I can't tell if that's just a very obscure word or if it's a curse of reading a book from 1998. And the phrase 'living rerun' was used about 53 times, especially in the latter half of the book, and while it's a fun analogy for what was happening, I can't help but feel the author thought the title pun was so funny he must remind the reader of it at every available opportunity.
(also, seeing the word 'portable' used to mean a laptop computer was quite funny.)
But between the exposition dumps and the unnecessarily long dream sequences, I do actually think the idea of Salem inhabitants possessing people in the present day is a fun concept, so it gets 3 stars for that.
Unfortunately, the ending also feels pretty anticlimactic, and ultimately just comes down to
Other irksome things that might just be me being petty: several times the term 'pocketbook' was used, and I can't tell if that's just a very obscure word or if it's a curse of reading a book from 1998. And the phrase 'living rerun' was used about 53 times, especially in the latter half of the book, and while it's a fun analogy for what was happening, I can't help but feel the author thought the title pun was so funny he must remind the reader of it at every available opportunity.
(also, seeing the word 'portable' used to mean a laptop computer was quite funny.)