Grim by Rupert Smith

Grim by Rupert Smith
My rating: 3 of 5 stars

A good book by a good writer, just not really what I was looking for. I bought this book and then took about 8 months to read it. There were no reviews on the Amazon US site where I bought it and no in-depth reviews on Goodreads so I couldn’t really figure out what it was about. Mostly I was wondering if there was any gay angle in the book and the answer is basically no. The book itself is a British horror written in the Stephen King mode, with some Rosemary’s Baby and a touch of Maeve Binchy thrown in.
After reading the prolific Mr. Smith’s amazing Man's World, I then read I Must Confess and was less impressed. I feel that Mr. Smith has a little trouble writing likable characters and this book is no exception. While he writes plot and story very well, this is an area I would work on.
The book was a little slow to get going, by 50% I was into it and by 70% I couldn’t put it down and raced to the end. Again Smith writes very well but there were a few points I got stuck at along the way. The American hero speaks and thinks in British slang, which was okay, I enjoyed the Britishness of it all, but I didn’t understand why. There’s one point where he’s talking to someone and thinks to himself Do the British really talk like that? I’m thinking you’ve been talking like that the whole book!
The other thing is the religious aspect, the moral of the story could quite easily be that Catholicism is the one true religion, and I didn’t really sign up for that either.
I don’t want to give anything away but the story was engaging in itself and I enjoy books where you have to burn through the end to find out what happens.
There is again the question of proofreading for the Kindle, or lack thereof. The version I purchased on November 27, 2013 had about a dozen errors. What is the answer for this? Does the author need trusted friends who can proofread? Should those of us who can offer our services? Whatever the answer is the ebook community has yet to find it. Some of the most glaring errors:
At location 175, a paragraph is doubled, starting with ‘There is nothing wrong with this house.
At location 2048, “restore the land and the building to its original usage, id est a place of worship”
At location 4735, “No doctors are nurses were harmed”
At location 5349, “if he looked down between yhe arms”
At location 5835, “It feels like a had a whole bottle of scotch.”
At location 6249, Chapter 17, doubles the word ‘and’ in the first sentence.

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