Sleeper Train – Jay Bower and John Lynch

2.5 stars

I wanted to like this a lot, but it just didn’t jive well with me. I felt like I was reading an old PSN game where there were several different arcs you could play, but the book tried to mash them all together. This didn’t feel as cohesive as I wanted it to be; because we constantly bounced between several characters, I don’t feel I got one solid storyline. I would’ve liked this more as either a choose your own adventure type book or one book that follows one story and a few novellas after to follow other characters.

The spicy scenes didn’t work for me. They didn’t integrate into the story as much as they could have; most of them felt extremely gratuitous. The terminology was awkward to read in places. I just don’t feel like these scenes enhanced my reading experience any. And for the train being an “anything goes as long as you have money” experience, the spicy parts were downright tame.

The creature seemed to come out of nowhere. I honestly would’ve loved this to be an out-and-out slasher that really ramped up on the blood and the gore and the outrageous sex rather than adding a creature feature in. With that addition, the book was too ambitious to me, and it lost some of its charm because of it.

This one wasn’t for me, unfortunately. While an interesting premise, I couldn’t quite get past the shallow cardboard-esque characters and overly ambitious trope additions.