Sapphire's Review Store 3.0

Review by Hana: The Vampire Invasion

Title: The Vampire Invasion

Author: GoldenUnseen

Reviewer: LeafStorm924

Summary: 3.5/5

The summary is quite promising, and it showed good use of foreshadowing to express suspense and draw the reader in. However, there's some slight redundancy in the use of "occur" two sentences in a row — perhaps one of them can be replaced by a synonym like "happen". Some information, such as Mark's occupation as a teacher, could have been opted out and left to be written in the story itself instead of the summary as well. There are a few structuring problems seen here:

"The husband, Mark, a teacher at the local high school, when he sees two new people have appeared, he was shocked."

It has phrases that would have flowed better when ordered differently. Perhaps writing "When the husband, Mark, saw two new people appear at the local high school where he teaches, he was shocked." would be a better choice.

If these problems, alongside a few errors in punctuation and capitalisation, were fixed, this would most certainly be a very intriguing summary.

Grammar: 3.5/5

There were not many issues with grammar throughout the story. There are a number of tense changes throughout the story, one being in the summary, that being:

"The husband, Mark, a teacher at the local high school, when he sees two new people have appeared, he was shocked."

There is also a tense change in the third chapter: 

"Mr Smith teaches science in the local high school. He reached the school thirty minutes early so that he could collect the question paper for the exam." 

More tense changes like these are dotted throughout the chapter, and changing them would greatly improve the quality of this story.

Characterisation: 3.5/5

The dialogue that is shared between Noah and Mary, the vampires, is rather stilted and unrealistic, but I'm willing to let this slide as their unnatural speech could be because they aren't human. However, some of the human characters could have been characterised better. For example, in chapter five, it's written:

"Shirley immediately fell silent. She was scared of him."

It would have been far more enjoyable to read how Shirley was afraid of Noah, instead of her emotions being stated outright. Apart from falling silent, how else can we know she's scared? Is she trembling? Has her voice gotten softer? Is she having trouble looking the vampires in the eye? All these would have shown Shirley's fear without using the sentence "she was scared of him.".

Similarly, in chapter twenty Jessica finds out that Lucas is a vampire, too, and she merely says "oh" as a reaction. After that, it's written:

"She was disappointed."

Again, it would've been interesting to read how she was disappointed. Did she say "oh" flatly, showing her disappointment? Did she immediately go off to do something else as though disinterested? 

Showing the characters' emotions instead of telling them will make them more fleshed-out. Right now, the characters are rather two-dimensional, but after a bit of work, they should be intriguing and likeable. 

Style: 2.5/5

There a few cases where sentences didn't flow very well and made the prose unpleasant to read, like this line from chapter three:

"They headed towards the class. All the children were rushing to get to their classes."

This scene might have been trying to convey how Mary and Noah had to wade through all these kids in order to get to their next lesson. Since the rushing children and Mary and Noah going to class can be linked, perhaps the sentence could be rewritten as:

"They headed towards the class, trying to push through all the other children who were rushing to get to their lessons."

The entire story had some trouble with phrasing and dividing paragraphs. The chapters were all quite short, and while that in itself is not a problem at all, many of the chapters ended abruptly. This could have been an attempt at causing suspense, but it instead made it difficult to go along with the story. Maybe a few of the chapters could be combined, which would make for a better reading experience.

In addition, many lines of dialogue ended with a dialogue tag, like "said" or "asked". Using dialogue tags at the end of nearly every line makes the prose clunky. It might be better to forgo some of these tags every few lines.

Plot: 4/5

The plot was overall rather well thought-out, and many of the plot twists that happened were truly unexpected and could have made the story more exciting. Concepts such as the Blue Moon and vegetarian vampires were also very creative. However, the style and characterisation of the cast prevented this story from becoming the best it can be, and I hope that the writer can work on these skills so that they can transform this plot into a well-written story.

OVERALL SCORE: 17/25

Notes: This story has a lot of potential. I quite liked reading it despite the errors in grammar, but I'm sure I would've liked it even more had the pacing of the story been improved upon. It's true, the style and lack of good characterisation sometimes made it difficult to keep reading on, but these are things that will improve with time and practice. To conclude, The Vampire Invasion has room for improvement - it's not a bad book by any means, but it could certainly get better in some aspects.