{"id":8786,"date":"2021-09-06T19:32:52","date_gmt":"2021-09-06T23:32:52","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.monsterlibrarian.com\/TheCirculationDesk\/?p=8786"},"modified":"2021-09-06T19:33:13","modified_gmt":"2021-09-06T23:33:13","slug":"book-review-shockadelica-by-jon-o-bergh","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.monsterlibrarian.com\/TheCirculationDesk\/book-review-shockadelica-by-jon-o-bergh\/","title":{"rendered":"Book Review: Shockadelica by Jon O’ Bergh"},"content":{"rendered":"

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Shockadelica <\/em>by Jon O’Bergh<\/p>\n

Bookbaby, 2021<\/p>\n

ISBN: 9781098372415<\/p>\n

Available: Paperback, Kindle edition\u00a0(\u00a0Bookshop.org<\/a> |\u00a0Amazon.com<\/a> )<\/strong><\/p>\n

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Shockadelica<\/em> is a suspense\/horror ghost story that uses the tried and true tools of an old apartment building with mysterious noises in the night.\u00a0 The premise has worked for many authors over the years, but Shockadelica<\/em> never quite gets the story off the ground floor.\u00a0 It’s an extremely dialogue-heavy story, and it’s difficult to keep the reader’s interest through the entire 252 pages.<\/p>\n

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Drag queen Kendall and his buddy Jenna start hearing unexplainable noises in their apartment building, and they soon learn that their neighbors do as well.\u00a0 Feeling that an actual haunting would be great material for their “all things horror” weekly podcast, Kendall and Jenna investigate, and learn that the building has a sinister history.\u00a0 The rest is a mystery as they try to find the source of the noises in the building, and whether it is a true haunt, or human nature with an evil purpose.<\/p>\n

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It’s a decent premise, just very slow moving.\u00a0 The first 130 pages consist almost entirely of Kendall and Jenna interviewing the building’s other inhabitants to learn what they may have seen or heard.\u00a0 The dialogue is\u00a0 straightforward, without much injection of the characters’ personalities.\u00a0 Hearing about the “hauntings” secondhand through dialogue with the other residents hurts the story’s excitement level. Describing the incidents as they actually happen from a narrative point of view would have helped; the few times the hauntings are narrated by the author are pretty good, and doing it more would have helped a great deal.\u00a0\u00a0 The story doesn’t start building real interest until around page 186.\u00a0 The payoff at the end of the book is decent and there is a nice touch of Irish folk legend involved, it’s just questionable if readers will make it that far.<\/p>\n

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As for the characters, the secondary ones help the story more than the primary ones.\u00a0 Kendall and Jenna are uninspiring characters; outside of talking about dresses, they don’t do much and generate minimal interest or sympathy.\u00a0 Fleshing them out more would have helped.\u00a0 The secondary characters are eclectic and have a little more life.\u00a0 Vince, the goth\/metal musician, is fun, and Rooney is probably the best.\u00a0 She makes her living doing bogus written and video reviews for products she’s never used, and her adventures between the building walls trying to scare her annoying neighbor add some much-needed flair.\u00a0 It’s too bad the main characters weren’t as entertaining.<\/p>\n

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Shockadelica<\/em> may appeal to some readers who like stories with a lot of exposition, but most readers will probably want to skip this one.<\/p>\n

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Reviewed by Murray Samuelson<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Shockadelica by Jon O’Bergh Bookbaby, 2021 ISBN: 9781098372415 Available: Paperback, Kindle edition\u00a0(\u00a0Bookshop.org |\u00a0Amazon.com )   Shockadelica is a suspense\/horror ghost story that uses the tried and true tools of an old apartment building with mysterious noises in the night.\u00a0 The premise has worked for many authors over the years, but Shockadelica never quite gets the<\/p>\n

Read more<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[2474,4960,4959,4958,4957],"class_list":["post-8786","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-uncategorized","tag-book-review","tag-ghost-hunters","tag-haunted-apartments","tag-jon-obergh","tag-shockadelica"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.monsterlibrarian.com\/TheCirculationDesk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/8786","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.monsterlibrarian.com\/TheCirculationDesk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.monsterlibrarian.com\/TheCirculationDesk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.monsterlibrarian.com\/TheCirculationDesk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.monsterlibrarian.com\/TheCirculationDesk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=8786"}],"version-history":[{"count":4,"href":"https:\/\/www.monsterlibrarian.com\/TheCirculationDesk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/8786\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":8830,"href":"https:\/\/www.monsterlibrarian.com\/TheCirculationDesk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/8786\/revisions\/8830"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.monsterlibrarian.com\/TheCirculationDesk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=8786"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.monsterlibrarian.com\/TheCirculationDesk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=8786"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.monsterlibrarian.com\/TheCirculationDesk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=8786"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}