This is, sadly, unrated.

In the first part, set in 1999, a boy flushes his genetically engineered, stolen military mutant, pet octopus down the toilet. In the 2014, it comes back and eats the town. This should be fantastic, and as a huge B-movie fan I snapped it up the moment it became available.

And after reading it, I’m glad it was free.

I finished it but…what can I say? Even a homage to B-movies should be legible. Confused plots, colorful and quickly-drawn characters, cliche, tropes, and nonsense dialog are all within the genre. The grammar, on the other hand, isn’t.

It’s rare for me to unrate a book because of grammar issues, and rarer for me to say that an author really needs an editor. Usually when a reviewer says that, they are nit-picking over missed full stops. This book is the rare exception, containing phrases like:

“…looked in the direction the octopus had went.”

as well as poor and erratic punctuation for speech throughout. Apostrophes are missing, commas uncorralled, and quotations marks roam freely or even reverse.

The formatting is unfortunately variable. My reader generated a huge gap in the middle of the text in one section, but that might be the software. However the book switches between double and single spacing in paragraphs more than once, which is just confusing.  Each snippet of the story is marked with a bolded, left-aligned text heading, but there is no extra distinction made between the first and second half – one of these headings contains 2014 as the only indication that the story has jumped ahead. It really could have done with a chapter or section break.

Overall it is trying to be so bad it is good, but unfortunately it fails. There is the seed of a good schlocky story here, but the execution lets it down badly.