Book Spotlight: Corrosion by Jon Bassoff

Happy New Year, Beardies!

I hope everyone had a great Holiday Season!  Speaking of Holidays...I apologize for the lack of content on the blog from around Thanksgiving until now. I started a new job around Halloween, and getting used to having a schedule that changes from week to week has been an adjustment—not to mention working during days every once and a while (something I haven't done since 2005). Enough about that, however; we have a book to discuss.

Today's title, Corrosion, comes to us from DarkFuse—a publisher that specializes in horror and dark fantasy, and one from which I've already spotlighted two other titles. Let's just say that I'm a DarkFuse Fan!

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Premise:
A story of passion and betrayal, loss and obsession, and violence and undeniable horror...the worlds of a mysterious Iraq war veteran with a horribly scarred face, a disturbed young man in a strange mountain town, and a masked preacher with a terrible secret will eventually collide in an old mining shack buried deep in the mountains.

Gems for Writers:
Plotting. Bassoff does an extraordinary job of delivering the plot to his readers; the three parts of the story are separately complete—each are just as frightening!—but it's in their seamless coalescence that Bassoff weaves a story arc of unimaginable horror.

[Cigarette] Smoke and [Corroded] Mirrors. This Gem is much like the first, which is to say the Plotting of the story alone lends itself to a Bait-and-Switch type of feel to the plot...the good kind of unexpected shock and awe. Jon leaves breadcrumbs throughout each of the three parts, which can only be retraced upon the story's completion. Of course, following them might just get you killed.

Pebbles to Polish:
Suffocated by Style. Jon Bassoff has an interesting style running throughout the book: kill the quotation marks. While I know it's acceptable because of its deliberate consistency, it was still jarring. So much so that it often left me reading and re-reading passages of text, putting proper punctuation in where it's needed in writing for clarity. Sometimes it's okay to break free of some of the rules in order to show a unique style—Hell, I'm all for it!—but not when it causes confusion or your readers to trip over what could have been truly stellar prose. Bassoff's choice for a lack of classic style over simple story telling was, at times, almost as horrific as the action.

Rating:

Conclusion:
All said, I really enjoyed the book—especially its plausible (and therefore chilling) reality. I would definitely recommend this title to my readers who are fans of horror. Had I not stumbled through the text to separate dialogue from narrative, I would have easily given Corrosion the 4.5 stars it deserves.

'Ware o' the Mountain Folk,


***Corrosion (2013), by Jon Bassoff, is published by and copyright DarkFuse Publishing. It is available in stores, online (see above), and from your local public library.

***Per FTC Regulations: I received a free Advance Reading Copy (ARC) from the author and was not compensated in any way, monetarily or otherwise, for this review.