Never finished. Well over a year. Deleting.
Michele Roger today begins releasing her free serialized audiobook, Dark Matter. Sounds kinda creepy:
In a freak accident that leads to her untimely death Louella, a plain Jane from the suburbs finds herself transformed into one of the walking undead. Michael, the Archangel, offers her a chance to win her life and family back. Louella learns that even in the afterlife nothing is free. She must pit her meager supernatural abilities against the mounting forces of darkness. Confronting problematic demons and monsters from Otherworld and beyond who agressively continue to tip the scales in the war of good and and evil in the favor of the Dark One. With the help of Steven, the altruistic vampire and De Vok, a dead librarian from the ancient Alexandria, Luella walks the world between the living and the dead. In her quest to regain her life she learns that even the forces for good have their own agendas and cannot always be trusted. This book is a macabre stew of horror, fantasy, science fiction and humor.
Michele has the requisite first five episodes available. You can crank through them by subscribing to the default feed if you choose. Or if you’re already overloaded with media files, you’ll appreciate our customized feeds. You’ll get episodes of this serialized audiobook released on a schedule that you choose. Very handy!
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on Friday, March 13th, 2009 at 6:49 am and is filed under New Books.
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March 19th, 2009 at 8:52 pm
Never have been a fan of your token zombie stories/movies- but this is turning out great! I’m really enjoying it, keep up the great work Roger!
March 22nd, 2009 at 7:35 am
Does music play throughout this? It’s so distracting.
April 2nd, 2009 at 5:03 am
I don’t think this story is ready by any stretch of the imagination. The chapters are brimming with padding that serve only to encourage mental meanderings as the story progresses providing little more than a background distraction. It actually took me a fair degree of concentrative effort to listen to this story. Why there is so much pointless rambling escapes me, but this detracted me from gathering any real momentum of interest in this tale.
The author needs to cut the emotional ties to this piece, do some brutal editing , and then tighten up what is left to bring it up to scratch. Because this story needs so much work there is little point in delving into the particulars of its flaws, suffice it to say it needs work.
The reading leaves a lot to be desired and unfortunately does nothing to improve the story’s shortcomings. Delivery is largely flat and expressionless, with the few failed attempts to inject sensation seeming somewhat out of place. The production contains some additional audio content to the oratory, but unfortunately these are rare and seem to be more of an afterthought. They did little more than startle me at each occurrence. It was not that they were infused poorly, just that they were inconsistent and only added to the already palpable distraction.
The audio quality is quite poor and with the earlier chapters the volume levels are low and hollow. Attempts to counter this in later chapters by increasing recording levels have resulted in a peaky, distorted sound with excessive clipping in places. The reverberation is still present and coupled with a mid-rage heavy frequency response gives an unpleasant boomy quality.
I don’t want to be to harsh with my opinion because this has the potential to be a good story. There is clearly talent lurking in the fingers of the author, but I think the release of this piece was premature. As it stands, I would have to recommend giving it a miss.
April 10th, 2009 at 2:25 pm
When I first started listening to this I was excited – the characters were compelling and the premise was very interesting. The variations in audio quality distracted me a lot though and I felt the heroine was plunged into the action a little too quickly to be realistic (yeah, I know, it’s not real so who is to say what is realistic). She also seemed to get over major life changes a little too quickly (I’m not talking about her death). The final battle dragged on a bit for me, and I got bored with Chapter 18 and stopped the podiobook right there.
Overall, I think this is a good story that, with a little more fleshing out of the characters, perhaps extending her time underground (that part was very fun to listen to) and a little less detail in other areas I think this could be one of the top podiobooks on this site.
April 23rd, 2009 at 9:24 pm
Hi again, I finished listening to the novel- I think it was excellant. There is something to be desired but overall I don’t believe it to be quite as dire as Jim states. The emotional ties, in my opinion, were what took it apart from similar novels in the genre. I think the France chapters did drag on a bit- some of what you said could’ve been really shortened down but overall, I really really enjoyed it and told my mates to have a listen as well.
Also, one other thing- your voice though pleasant is not exactly good for narrating as it is monotone, I think you would largely benefit from having someone else with the vocal talents to narrate.
Finally, this isn’t strictly to do with Dark Matter- but I have listened to your other audionovel,The Conservatory and I have to say I love it so far! Equally chilling (I can not listen to it during my nightly train commute! too scary!) and weirdly wonderful. Can’t wait for the next episode!
April 26th, 2009 at 4:18 pm
2 points: The narration is so subdued that a lot of interesting material is easily missed. Also, in episode 5, Kyrie eleison is greek not latin.
May 10th, 2009 at 4:26 pm
It’s easy to be a critic. Listening to a book as opposed to reading one, we are only limited by our own imaginations. I enjoyed this.
May 11th, 2009 at 8:23 am
The female lead is soft in the beginning but comes out swinging in the end. The romance that envelops was also a plus. I thought it was a nice twist at the end….original. War, prophecy, religion, science, romance, vampires, zombies, the end of the world and a whole lot of books. Pretty good…
May 13th, 2009 at 11:30 am
So where are the rest of the episodes? I have seen on itunes that the work is completed.
June 8th, 2009 at 9:20 pm
I would love to hear the story “remastered” Just really tough to get through the beginning, (due to recording quality). Thanks!
September 3rd, 2009 at 12:11 am
For some reason it stops at chapter 7 here, but if you click on the link for the author’s website you can download the rest of the story. I enjoyed Dark Matter though I do agree with another poster the sound wasn’t the best.