Jeff Hays is a good actor, a passable singer, and a mad voice mod operator. His performance is great as always, though, at times, he goes too far overboard with one or two characters, making it hard to understand what he’s saying. Matt Dinniman, on the other hand, is slipping… He used to balance relatively well between “entertaining” and “disgusting”. In this book, however, he started to cross this line too frequently for my comfort into the “disgusting” zone. Additionally, his unimaginative usage of the same expletives as adjectives in every other sentence (the “g.d. ” pattern in most cases) is getting rather annoying, especially since almost every character now uses the same sentences and speech patterns as everyone else, making all these characters rather flat and taking away from their independent development. The author seems to have fallen into a narrative trap of sorts by leaning heavily into the pervy stuff to achieve comedic effect at first, and now not being able to slow down or adjust direction without noticeably changing the pace – something he apparently is not willing to sacrifice for whatever reason. All in all, by this book the quality of the narrative has fallen so significantly that even a great performance by the narrator can no longer save it.
Review from A Parade of Horribles →
