Jennifer Ainsley: The Final Demon War by Sidney Stone has been waiting to be reviewed for a while. I thought it was not the first book in the series, so it collected dust in my shelves. Perhaps the title the Final Demon War made me think it was the last in a series, but I was wrong, it is the first.
Genre: Dark Fantasy
Publisher: Createspace
Released: 2013
Stars: 2 Stars
Reviewer: Michael D. Griffiths
The story begins when a Civil War soldier, Jonathan, is contacted by the Demons living on Earth. These Demons have rejected both God and Lucifer and want to commit genocide on all of humanity. The only reason they have not done so is because they are outnumbered by humans.
Since Jonathan had a broken heart because of a failed romance, he decided to join the Demons. He became the wealthiest man on the Earth while living into modern times. Later, he has twins and adopts Jennifer. As the Demons prepare to destroy all humans, Jonathan betrays the Demons when he finds out that Jennifer is the new savoir of mankind.
I hate to tear open a book, but I guess I have not read a self-published novel for a while and this one helped me remember why. The first point against it was the slow build. The author keeps introducing new characters with long backstories, which despite the histories, remain undeveloped and stiff. All the characters lose their families, and many have ill fated relationships. At one point the author even devotes a whole chapter to a dozen new characters and tries to tell their life story right before they are killed. I know he is setting this up for a trilogy, but this book should have lost about a third of its pages.
Then, after all this waiting, the fight scenes were not described. Demons would rush up a hill and ‘Jennifer would slay them all with her sword.’ Also, why would the powerful demons wait until there were seven billion people with high tech weapons when they could have just wiped out our race five thousand years ago when there were only a half a billion of us and our most advanced weapon was the sling?
He bills this book as a horror, and it has about zero percent of what I would consider any horror novel material. Top this off with a religious undertone and I am not even sure what motivated me to finish this thing.
Finally, and anyone who reads my reviews knows this is a major peeve of mine, the Point of View switched from character to character sometimes one paragraph after another. Again, I hate to be mean, but this novel helps prove why publishers are important.
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