Title: Protected by a Rock Star Vigilante
Author: Ramona Richey
Date: 2023
Publisher: Ramona Richey
Quote: "In that moment of reckoning, justice was served, and a beacon of hope illuminated the darkness..."
This looks like a full-length novel, and it's like that all the way: one cliche after another. The rock star vigilante, whose stage name is Damien Evernight, whose superhero name is The Ember, and whose real name is never mentioned, has superpowers. When Lily is attacked by some of the faceless, generic criminals in their city, The Ember descends on them "in a whirlwind of music and power," wielding a guitar that apparently transforms into a sword. He kills some of the gang, wounds some, scatters the lot, carries a bruised and exhausted Lily home to rest, and is ready for business-as-usual the next day. Lily does not yet know that The Ember is Damien Evernight, but his band is her favorite anyway, so although she's supposed to be a responsible adult she becomes first a groupie, then a lead singer, and only then Damien's consort, because of course a superman like Damien is going to demand long walks, intimate conversations, and meals in cafes before he thinks about taking off his superhero unionsuit, which of course, in the best 1930s "Superman" tradition, has no front fly. Male superheroes in this fantasy are what's been called "Ken-dowed," or at least Ken-dressed, in body stockings that show only a general outline of any skin more sensitive than a forearm...
Book reviewing doesn't pay well. There are books for which reviewers feel that a copy to keep is all the payment we need. There are books for which we feel that we ought to be getting paid per word read. This is one of them. It could be a big achievement for a high school girl, lonely, silent, smoldering with hormones behind her bottle-bottom glasses, pouring out passion in a notebook in the back of the study hall...but golly, Dolly, it reads so much like ChatGPT. In any case, this is the work of someone who doesn't know how to write about, if person knows how to remember or imagine, a real concert, a real mugging, a real fight, a real reporter's job, or a real love affair.
If you get it for free you can laugh. Don't pay for this book. It's one thing to let ChatGPT generate a story outline, and it's another thing to paste whatever plagiaristic mishmash ChatGPT spews forth into a Kindle Document and try to pass it off as a book just like the books real humans sit down and write. Protected by a Rock Star Vigilante reads like the voice-over in a movie (or, considering its length, a series of movies) where the slick cliches would fade into scenes where the action of the story was, well, acted. To turn ChatGPT's plagiarized, "suggested" remx into a plot, the writer needs to visualize, to act out if necessary, each action scene and write about it with the specific details and insight that give readers this concert, this conversation, this city's problem.
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