Shadow Dream Girl - A Bennet the Sage Psychological Horror Tale

[Kugelfisch]

"Buy! My! Book! (if you ever want to see another Animu Abandon again)"

I won't and I don't. Deal!

[RAPEMAN]

"Buy! My! Book!

[wulfenlord]

BENNETT THE FAG GOT HIS FIRST REVIEW from a cocksucker that helped him through Dark Times ™

It’s always interesting when a YouTuber releases a book, especially when they review media. Just because you think you know how to break a story down doesn’t mean you know how to build one. Too many content creators will just churn out a book in one draft and release it, hoping their fanbase doesn’t care about quality and will just fork over some cash. But Bennett White, also known online as Bennett the Sage (host of Anime Abandon), didn’t do that.

In White’s case, he provides a story that seems harmless at first to get your guard down, only to have you grasping at every word by the ending chapters because god dammit, you NEED to know exactly how this ends!

Shadow Dream Girl is about Ian. Ian's life is hell, the kind that would make Jean Paul Sartre offer a cookie and a hug. Stuck in a dead end job with customers he can barely stand, just to go home to pass out in an empty apartment all alone, Ian feels trapped in a dismal life that he doesn’t know how to navigate out of. Ian's life is so boring that he loses track of what month it is, stuck in a worsening spiral of depression, narcolepsy, and fervent self-loathing. And all that changes when fate tosses him a bone as a magnetic redhead walks into the movie rental store Ian works at and starts to change his life... but not for the better.

As a character, Ian is something of an acquired taste. He puts the “pathetic” in “sympathetic”, but he’s not a bad person. He’s just someone with no real direction or drive in life, as if he’s waiting for someone to magically pull him out of his funk. He lives alone in a small apartment. He works in the dying industry of DVD rentals. He has no love life to speak of and even he knows he’s undesirable. He’s somewhat relatable in this way, since I think we’ve all hit that low point where we’re tired of trying and we just need someone to give us a helping hand. But sometimes, as in Ian’s case, that help never arrives.

Surrounding Ian is a small, but thoughtfully crafted set of characters that are all used effectively. Stan is Ian’s movie-loving coworker, something of a movie snob, but very much a realist. The “Brians” are two friendly slackers who laugh and smile a lot, even though they don’t know the alphabet well enough to put DVDs back in order. Luke is a well-meaning, but impatient psychiatrist that Luke sees for his narcolepsy, and chats with about his depression. All these characters are fantastic because in a short amount of time, they each get enough definition to stand on their own AND they are used as reflections of Ian’s life. Stan likes his job and even though it’s a dead end job, he shows that it doesn’t have to be a prison sentence. The Brians live in squalor and should be miserable, but they aren’t. They’re a kind of happy that Ian both can’t understand and can’t achieve without confronting himself. Luke is reality staring Ian in the face, ready with answers that he can’t spell out. Ian has to reach those solutions by himself for them to mean anything.

And then there’s Lisa.

Lisa is the perfect girl, in Ian’s eyes. She’s a beautiful redhead, she makes the first move, she’s open about watching porn, she’s bisexual, and most importantly, without much effort on his part, she thinks Ian is cute. She’s too good to be too. Suspiciously too good to be true. It also doesn’t help that this fiery redhead gets associated with literal fire more than once. She’s where a lot of the plot really starts to turn. And oh man, when you find out what she’s really about…

The book is described as a psychological horror, and it fits as one, but it takes a while for it to build to that point. So much so that for a long while, I was going to claim the book was mislabeled. You’re not gonna get some Evil Within vibes right off the bat, but if you’re patient, the end of the book will have you at the edge of your seat. It’s a lot of setup, but when the reveals start hitting one after the other, you’ll be saying, “Oh, that makes sense,” every few pages.

The town Ian lives in doesn’t have a lot of definition, so the whole place feels like it’s encompassed by a fog, just outside of Ian’s reach. Everything the fog touches is muted. Normally, this would be a problem since you’d want a world to feel lived in, even without the protagonist. However, the psychological aspect of the story shines here, driving home how isolated Ian is. Compounded with his repetitive life, the world should feel dreary. It’s like Silent Hill, but without the monsters.

This is definitely an above average debut novel. A lot of care and attention went into shaping the characters and carving out the plot in just the right way. It even has a verbose lexicon sprinkled throughout the prose, done in such a way that doesn’t sound like the author whipped out a thesaurus for only a chapter or two.

However, I’d be remiss if I didn’t point out some of the issues of the book, minor as they are. There are some formatting issues with misaligned indentations, and some sloppy prose now and then. At one point, a sentence reads, “He grabbed his shoulders and shoved,” where “he” and “his” refer to two different people. It isn’t a huge or prevalent problem, but it is a stumble.

And while I didn’t see this as a mistake, some people might be turned off by how long it takes for the plot to get going. Shadow Dream Girl required a lot of setup, showing us Ian’s routines for the first quarter of the book when things really start to escalate. Some people might want something with a faster pace, but I would argue that all the setup is necessary for the payoff in the climax.

In conclusion, this is a daring book. It breaks a few writing conventions that I don’t want to spoil, but the way White is able to utilize repetition and make Ian’s tedium palpable was a high risk/high reward stylistic choice. It reads like it started as a tongue-in-cheek love letter to retail workers, but it ended in a surprisingly gripping adventure, one I’m damn glad I took.

This book gets an 8/10 from me.

[VoiceOfReasonPast]

>seems harmless at first
That's one way to write "bored me to tears".

[Kugelfisch]

Damn, only another IN bothered to review it as a ball washing attempt and he seriously struggles to come up with nice things to say.

[pibbs]

The reviewers Twitter bio:

Youtuber, writer and avid reader. Empress Theresa Scholar.

I torture myself by reviewing the worst books and movie adaptations.

>reviews bad books
>lies and gives good review

[Kugelfisch]

If you've ever seen his YT channel you'd be forgiven for thinking it's 2012 and you somehow went to TGWTG instead.
He's got Linkara-esque storylines with an evil version of himself that, of course, has a katana. Top cringe.

[Dehbashi]

The reviewers Twitter bio:

Youtuber, writer and avid reader. Empress Theresa Scholar.

I torture myself by reviewing the worst books and movie adaptations.

>reviews bad books
>lies and gives good review

It is funny how much ass kissing he gives. It's probably the worst IN book. He loves how long it takes to get the plot going. That's the fatal flaw of the book. Random crap written that isn't necessary to drag out the story. People will get bored to tears reading that. He also says the psychiatrist is impatient even though he is a saint due to how much of a whiny bitch Ian is. At least the other CA books had somewhat of redeeming factors.

[Kugelfisch]

I know him from his reviews of Onision's books and those are absolutely worse. It's likely one of the better IN books he's ever read, which is shocking but likely true.
I don't know if he read Lindsay's hot garbage. I doubt anyone but pipps actually read it.

[VoiceOfReasonPast]

No one has ever gazed upon the final pages of her sci-fi series finale aside from Lindsay herself.