A Burning Grudge by Barry Dobey

My rating out of 5: 2

Introduction

Burning Grudge by Barry Dobey takes place in Bedlington, England, where Don has lived since childhood. But everyone has their enemies. Since a child, Ray Donaldson, had been a thorn in the side of Don and his friends. This feud continued into adulthood, and grew more toxic, especially after the passing of Don's wife and children. Amidst the drama of normal Bedlington life, a virus in Brazil spread through the globe, causing those who die to reanimate and seek anything edible. 

Development

Development is this book's downfall, and the main issue I found with it.

Throughout the story, except one small portion in chapter 8, I lacked any sense of world or character building. The story was skimmed over and told instead of shown. Dobey did describe his character's appearances, and did give basic characteristics, but all the scenes were written in a disengaged voice. This made me feel separate from the story, when as a reader I wanted to see the world as if I were there. 

His characters weren't given scenes to show their emotions or how they individually think, or these scenes were skimmed. Thus the characters suffered similarly due to the presentation of the narrative.

Development is really hard sometimes, and sadly Burning Grudge didn't get the rich storytelling it deserved. 

Grammar and spelling

The dialogue was all grammatically incorrect. Dobey uses single quotes instead of double quotes throughout Burning Grudge. Single quotes are to be used to show a character telling a second party what a third person had said to him.
How single quotes are to be used:
"Richard told me 'every rabbit has a hole, and every bird a nest,' so I'll build us a home!"

He also doesn't separate different character's dialogue into separate paragraphs, instead putting all the dialogue into one paragraph that's difficult to read.

A final issue I found with dialogue. When a character speaks for two or more paragraphs, you should start each paragraph with a quotation, but leave the end of each paragraph open till the character is done speaking, then you add end quotes. Yet, Dobey doesn't start each paragraph with a quotation so it's hard to tell if the character is still speaking or not.

For spelling, I didn't notice any issues.

Random points:

Dobey did make a character (Will Masters) introduce himself twice to another character (Barry). This was redundant, and I wonder if he accidentally forgot to cut one of the introductions out.

Before that we followed Don and Hanna to a farm house, although Dobey accidentally used the name Emma in place of Hanna in one sentence, when Emma's character was currently a distance away at home suffering from some trauma.

Stuff I loved, hated, or took from this narrative

Before the zombies arrived on scene, we were presented with this feud between Don and his friends, and the Donaldsons. These first few chapters felt much more interesting to read then the zombie stuff. It still lacked development as did the entire book, but this part of the narrative was more interesting then what came later.

Another part I enjoyed was the end of chapter 8, where we watch the world darken from the perspective of a dying man who then reanimates into a "dead." It is the only place where I saw real development, where Dobey showed me this world instead of telling it to me.

I did accidentally read 15% of the way into the second book before starting this one, and got to see how depraved some character's got. This added a morbid curiosity to push me to keep reading.

Links

If you want to check out Barry Dobey on Facebook or Amazon, check the links below.

Amazon

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