Longshot by Avery Blake and Johnny Truant

Longshot by Avery Blake and Johnny Truant

I like first contact stories and alien invasions and this one starts out quite promisingly. It’s centered on a group of survivors in a Vegas casino who frankly don’t know what to do with themselves now that the aliens have come and the world is falling apart. Unfortunately, the story never really picks up speed and never really gains that spark of excitement and discovery that makes this subgenre of story so exciting. It should have. There’s a very interesting alien trap, a rendezvous with Area 51, and an ending that certainly veers off into seldom trod territory for invasion stories. Yet it didn’t quite work despite these promising features.

 

The biggest problem the size of the cast. It’s way too big and each of them gets a lot of screen time from their own POV. This might have worked in a longer book where lots of things were happening along the way, but because of the multiple perspectives, the introductory phase of the story lingers much too long and when something finally happens, they spend much too much time worrying about the thing, trying to convince themselves to take a chance and do something to take control of their fate.

 

When they finally decide to do that, their plan doesn’t really makes sense. They walk into a trap that kills some of them in a very bizarre way and they just keep walking into it. Then we get to examine the affect on each of them and it just further slows down a book that is already crawling.

 

The Area 51 portion of the story finally picks up a little speed, but the heroes make strange decisions that leads to an ending that feels like total loss even though it is my impression that it wasn’t supposed to feel that way.

 

I’m left more perplexed then enthralled.