Non-Review: “Yokai Blues: Part 1,” John LaTorre

In John LaTorre’s Yokai Blues: Part 1 paranormal creatures came out of the closet about a generation ago (standard urban fantasy timeline). Nick has friends in that community, and one of them is dead–murdered.

My kindle tells me I made it about 12% of the way into this book before I gave up. The writing style didn’t appeal to me at all. There are parts of the writing that consist of one short, choppy sentence after another, which did weird things to the pacing. Verb tense changes suddenly in some areas. The overall style consists of detail piled on top of detail; I lost track of how much of the narrative was devoted to Nick’s alcoholism alone (okay, okay, we get the picture already). There are details that don’t match up in places, and a few bits (“Nick’s eye tore open”) that convey something very different than the author intended. Ow.

While I won’t review this on Amazon or Goodreads since I didn’t finish it, here I have hopefully given you enough detail to have an idea of whether or not you might like this book more than I did.