God Bless The Dead

by Evan Geller

God Bless The Dead "The truth will not set you free. The truth will get you killed.” -Screamin’ Jay Hawkins Gabriel Sheehan is in the truth business. He has invented a practical mind reading technology. But his wife, Helena, is no friend of the truth. Gabriel knew she was something of an enigma when he married her, but occasionally she seems more catatonic than enigmatic. And he definitely has the impression that she may have killed someone, though he’s not quite sure of the details. While his company is a success, the change his technology works upon society attracts the attention of powerful forces, both in and outside of the kind of forces that his wife has carefully been hiding from for her entire life. But now she can’t hide anymore. And those forces are intent on using his new technology in ways that Gabriel had never anticipated—in ways that may lead to his wife’s final disappearance. God Bless the Dead follows the lives of Gabriel, a failing grad student in Biophysics, and his wife, Helena. Helena is a brilliant, troubled, red-headed Irish émigré, the victim of abuse in a Sisters of Mercy orphanage. Based upon the most recent research in the field, God Bless the Dead presents a prescient and realistic look at our society in the immediate future, when secrets no longer exist and justice is defined by technology. It is a love story and a story of overcoming one’s past, an exploration of the nature of mental illness and, ultimately, an uplifting examination of what makes our thoughts manifest and our lives meaningful. All proceeds from each book sold are donated to research seeking improved care for mental illness.

Genres: Book Club

583 pages, Kindle Edition

First published July 19, 2012

About the author

Evan Geller is a surgeon and critical care physician living on Long Island. He is happily married and the father of three extraordinarily pleasant children. He writes on the side.

Reviews

[The Scarecrow · Rating 1 out of 5]

This is the first self-published book I've been asked to review on my blog. For a long time, I agreed with a lot of other reviewers in refusing to review self-published works, citing the books to be of bad quality and in dire need of editing. Then Angelfall came along. Woo boy did that book change my views on self-published books. So of course, I was in a really positive mindset when I was asked to review this.

Even then, I initially said no based on the atrocious quality of the sample I was sent, but the author seemed nice enough and didn't irritate me so I accepted on the grounds that I purchase my own copy. By doing that I could review the book with zero obligations to anyone except myself. That said, I should have stuck with my gut instinct and just said no more firmly. I could have at least bought a cup of coffee with the money. Maybe even a cookie.

Let's start with the good, because there is so little of it that it's just easiest to start with the simple stuff first. The concept for this is good. Sci-fi, mind reading, suspense, ghosts... It's got all the workings of a story with potential. The blurb on GR is better written than most blurbs on the site, and it really played a huge part in my decision to read the book. With believable characters, a touch of realism and a sense of humility regarding the editing process, this book could actually have had some potential.

What it does have instead, however, is stilted dialogue, grammatical errors by the truckload, insipid and irritating characters, long-drawn monologues and reference to rape as a means of gaining sympathy for a character. I actually finished this book last week and that last particular detail made me so angry that it made my physically ill (as in want-to-regurgitate-my-lunch ill) with rage. I still get angry just thinking about it. How about I just ease myself into talking about it, yeah? Let's start with...the dialogue.

"'Look at this tree, Gabriel. See how big and strong this tree is, Gabe?" He nodded. "How old do you think this tree is, Gabe?" Gabriel shrugged."

Ten points if you can guess the main character's name. Can ya? Huh? Gee, I don't know if you can, buddyroo; it's a real mystery. *facepalm* There's one particularly beautiful instance where six straight paragraphs begin with the word Gabriel. The word Gabriel turns up 2090 times in a 500 page book. The word Gabe appears 421 times. That means, if my math is correct, the main character's name is mentioned at least five times on every single page of the book. Saying someone's name isn't repeatedly only works on toddlers, if ever. Normally it just comes across as condescending, patronising and bloody damn irritating. That aside, who talks like this? Nobody talks like this. Everyone from Randall to Helen/Grace (from here on referred to as Helen to make for easy ranting) to Gabriel/Gabe/Gabby to Authur all sound the same. You can tell when an author has an ear for speaking style (choice of words people use, etc, not accents), dialects and personality when it comes across in the characters having distinct voices in their dialogue. This is worse than a Jodi Picoult novel in the sense that everyone talks in exactly the same tone, all the damn time. They all sound like patronising, self-indulgent know-it-alls. They also make me want to punch myself in the face.

"'WHAT? You told me in the car you knew how to do this shit! What happened to 'Don't worry, Gabe, it'll be fun'? I'm starting to think we have different ideas of fun, crazy fucking girlfriend...'"

"'WAFFLES! Stacks of waffles, with EGGS. Lots of eggs! Bacon! No, not bacon, SAUSAGE! No, no- bacon AND sausage! And orange juice, fresh squeezed, not that frozen shit! COFFEE! Black as tar and hot enough to kill, in that mug I like.'"

Who talks like this?! The speech is stilted, jarring and impossible to read out loud without resorting to excessive theatrics. This is all supplemented, of course, by a healthy dose of grammatical errors.

"'Couldn't figure why I was getting off the hook so easy until I was on my out the door.'" (I had to read that one three times before it made any sense.)

"'A really disturbed individual, like Steven King novel disturbed.'" (I doubt that Stephen King gives a damn about people who can't be bothered spelling his name right. Dude probably wrote a best-seller while I was writing this sentence.)

"Helena rolled her eyes, took a bite encompassing half the sandwich. 'Ok sport, I'll bite. What's your name, Professor?'" (So she took a massive mouthful of food and still spoke coherently? Is she a ventriloquist?)

"They talked for hours, the room eventually getting twilight." (Did Stephenie Meyer give you a signed copy for that endorsement? Unless you mean twilight as in the time of day, in which case a more grammatically correct usage would be something like 'filled with twilight'.)

"Her entire body, usually the shade of bones bleached for years in the desert, had gone crimson, matching her hair." (I can't decide if the overuse of commas is worse than the mix-up of metaphor and similie. In this case, a similie (usually as white as bones...) would be more appropriate. Unless, of course, she is Voldemort in disguise literally bone white in which case go right ahead, by all means.)

I could go on, but I believe in being both brief and to the point. I'm sure you get the gist; this book is badly written. There's also the terrible characterization, where people come across more like caricatures than, you know, three-dimensional, believable people.

"'Take me away,' she said, smiling and spreading her arms wide, beer in hand. Before he did, she took a moment to empty her glass onto the gentleman beneath her heel."

"'Helena! I have had an epiphany!'"

NOBODY TALKS LIKE THIS. I have also never met a woman who literally pinned a dude, heel to neck, to the floor because he slapped her ass. Never, and I've met plenty of women in my short 23 years of age. Real women don't do that. They'd glare, cuss him out, slap or punch him, sure. They would never do the stiletto-to-the-neck trick. No-one with common sense will do that because the ankles and wrists are some of the weakest parts of the body. If you really want to pin someone, pro-tip, use your shin bone or forearm so that the weight is more evenly distributed, simultaneously giving you more balance and allowing you to exert more force in holding them down. Sure, it's not as sexy, and it appears that a convoluted idea of sexy is all the author was trying to convey, but it's effective and effectiveness is believable.

Outside of all of this epic-fail-desu-yo, this book still needs heavy editing. It probably won't get the editing necessary, though! The author apparently thinks his "masterpiece" really needs the "'non plot-driving scenes', my lacy descriptive prose, my 'realistic-to-the-point-of-excess-verbosity' dialogue." He will "not have it sliced off down to the sinew, even if done by a master surgeon." He's absolutely right, by the way. Who needs editors, right? It's not like it's a necessary job or anything. Editors, pah. We especially don't need any editors who actually trim down the book's content, no siree old hoss, none of that 'editing' mumbo-jumbo for REAL writers. *beats head against desk repeatedly*

(Incidentally, the author also claims to "take rejection badly". I must be a masochist.)

The sad reality is that nobody needs an eight page backstory on the main character's life, especially when it has zero relevance to the story. Those eight pages could have been summed up as "Gabriel's former research proposal had fallen through completely". As Stephen King would say, nobody gives a fuck so fuhgeddaboudit.

[tangent] I always feel like every new author should be given a copy of King's 'On Writing'. Hell, here's a link to a free PDF, in case you're too poor to buy it immediately/too lazy to hunt it down. It's not the book-writing bible, but it's a zero-bullshit guide to the very basics and is infinitely useful. If you're an aspiring writer, I couldn't recommend it enough. [/tangent]

*agitated huff* Okay, there's no avoiding it, is there? If I'm going to review this right, I have to review it all the way. Okay, let's do this.

[rant]

"'That night, he beat me up double, just to prove the point. Before starting in on the usual, that is. I just took it. Waiting. Because I knew, eventually, he would be ready. And when he was, when he was on top of me and good and distracted, I shoved a sharpened length of coat hanger up under his breastbone.'"

I'll just come out and say it, the author created a miserable, selfish bitch of a character (on the first date with the main character she orders lobster even though she hates it just because he's paying and she wanted to order the most expensive thing) and wanted to make the character feel sorry for her by making her a rape victim. Oh boo hoo, she's so miserable and cruel because she was abused as a child, angst angst angst. I hate people who use rape as a sympathy tactic. It's cheap, disrespectful and downright low to use a traumatic experience as a potential money-grabber. Aw, poor Helena. Except no, not at all, really. The author understands nothing about rape. Zip, zilch, nada.

"'I don't think three weeks passed before that priest decided I needed special, private sessions. Every week, every Thursday, he'd say mass and then have the sisters collect me for my special sessions with that fat, drunken bastard. He was an evil creature, Randall.'"

Thanks for pointing that out for me, by the way. I never would have guessed that a drunken child rapist was a bad person if you hadn't spelled it out for me so clearly. The author thinks that I R DUM REEDAR, obviously.

I hate the rapist-priest stereotype, first of all. A vast quantity of abusers and rapists tend to not be fat, drunken catholic priests but fathers, brothers, aunts, babysitters; basically normal, everyday people that you wouldn't suspect. The use of the stereotype only serves to make the experience more fictional and gimmicky, thereby removing any of the seriousness of the topic.

You know what's worse? Instead of beating me across the head with a stilted, badly-written account of rape, maybe the author could have, oh I don't know, actually hinted at her abuse by mentioning the impact of it early on in the novel? That would have been a better way to go. Rape victims usually have huge amounts of trouble forming romantic relationships, or enjoying sex (note that I use the term usually, since not everyone is the same). A lot of them either completely disconnect during sex or react physically. They suffer from panic attacks, exaggerated emotional outbursts, fainting, nausea, blacking out or general physical aversion. How is none of this shown in the first parts of the novel where Helena is casually having sex with Gabriel? She has sex with him repeatedly. She later gets into a relationship with him and even gets married. Zero trust issues. No aversions to sex. Our character, whose rape is meant to be a catalyst for a lot of a major events in the rest of her life, exhibits absolutely none of the after-effects normally associated with rape victims.

You want to read a proper account of abuse? Go read a book written by a man who saved these kids for a living, even though he got paid next to nothing for it. Harry Keeble knows how rape traumatizes and destroys. This book does not.

[/rant]

I hate this book. I'm deleting it off my Kindle and I'm never reading it again. Thanks to this book, I'm having my friend look over my review policy this weekend so she can remove the part where it says I'll review self-published books if you send me a sample. I won't. Angelfall can only do so much and quite frankly, I never want to read another self-published book again.

Obviously, I can't tell you what to do because unlike this book, I have respect for you, my reader, and realize that you can think for yourself and come to conclusions on your own. I will, however, strongly advise you to avoid this with a barge pole. Read the other two books I recommended instead. Or better yet, if you're in the mood for science fiction you could do worse than read 'Dune' by Frank Herbert. I'm reading it right now and am absolutely, utterly and irrevocably in love with it.

Go forth and read on, my lovelies. Just make sure that whatever you're reading has seen a competent editor first.

[Ethan Geller · Rating 5 out of 5]

Fantastic stuff! A constant stream of undulating layers that are neatly tied together by an extremely effective ending

[Charline Ratcliff · Rating 5 out of 5]

I finally finished reading my copy of “God Bless The Dead” by new author Evan Geller. Let me start by saying that “God Bless The Dead” was an extraordinary read. Geller writes with a crisp, clean style that immediately pulls the reader into his tale. He is both knowledgeable and explanatory in his descriptions without going so far as to become boring or verbose.

I appreciated the world history that appeared now and again throughout the book and truthfully I think “God Bless The Dead” encompasses the best of almost every single literary genre. There’s intrigue, espionage, drama, medical, technical/science fiction that, when used correctly, can go hand-in-hand with fantasy plus there’s even a beautiful love story swirled around in the mix. Don’t get me wrong – “God Bless The Dead” was not a perfect book but, it was pretty darn close.

Gabriel Sheehan, one of the book’s main characters, is a failing Biophysics grad student. He’s a genius who was given tens of thousands of dollars in grant money to prove a theory, but when the day came to provide the proof; Gabriel showed up empty handed.

Helena Fiana, another of the main characters, is brilliant and Irish American. She has a mane of flaming red curls and I’m pretty sure that “trouble” is her real middle name. Initially Gabriel met Helena during a class he TA’d but then, a year later, he ran into her again when he was trying to drown his troubles at the local pub. They left the bar together and the rest is, as they say, history. Helena was Gabriel’s muse, and the next morning he had the epiphany that would change his life as well as the lives of the rest of the world. With that hurdle overcome, Gabriel started down the path that would eventually lead him to invent mind reading technology.

I don’t want to give away any more of Geller’s book but to sum up: it was a fantastic read. There were some errors here and there with correctly spelled words not being the proper words for the sentences they were found in but let’s face it, no one’s perfect. Besides, five hundred plus pages is a lot to edit and, as of right now, our computers are not at a level where they can figure out context/meaning all by themselves. Thankfully…

(Reviewed in association with Rebecca's Reads).

[J · Rating 3 out of 5]

I won this in a Goodreads Giveaway.

Clear and understandable.

[Sylvie · Rating 5 out of 5]

This book helped me a lot with my personal life. It helped me understand many things about the other side. I'm keeping it on my night table and I read many lines again.

[Patti · Rating 3 out of 5]

Looking forward to reading the next book.

[Connie Murphy · Rating 5 out of 5]

What a great read! This book had it all...mystery, love, thriller...couldn't put it down!