The cover and picture of the author drew me in. I not only love historical fiction stories, I love a good western. Westerns are historical fiction too, right?
Tex’s Bloody Ground by Jason H. Campbell was published through Publish America – a print on demand publishing company. (Indie authors will have equal access to being reviewed and promoted on my blog.) Mr. Campbell is from Kentucky and Tex’s Bloody Ground is his first western.
Before I give my review, check out the blurb.
They had him running, and he was not the running kind. He lay low over his horse; his shirt was stuck to his back, soaked in blood. He knew they meant to kill him. One man alone he could take, but they were many. And like an animal outnumbered by wolves, he ran for his life.
One of the men he had killed was riding his horse. A horse that he had raised himself from a colt. Now it had been any other horse, he wouldn’t have minded so much. He’d just steal him back. So when they stole Ole Blue, they made a mistake. Ole Blue was tall, and built for speed, with not an ounce of fat on him. And when he felt like moving, there wasn’t a horse around that could keep up with him.
So when he fount out what happened. He just saddled up his mare, and lit out after them, following the tracks. The trail finally stopped at a little town, riding in slow he tied the mare up, and strolled in. Where he came from, back in the mountains of Kentucky he was taught one thing the weak brag and the strong do without talking. As soon as he stepped in, he took one look at the man he knew had stole his horse, then he went for his gun.
It sounds intriguing, right?
Review
This is one of those books where the actual writing did not live up to the cover and blurb. I checked out Publish America and found a lot of conflicting information and many flame wars on writers’ message boards. I am not weighing in on the company as I do not have any personal experience working with them, however, they need better editing!
Sorry if this isn’t a conventional review but it does play into the quality of the book.
This comes from Publish America’s fact sheet.
FACT #11: We assign an editor who goes through the text line by line. Let’s put this in perspective. We don’t touch style issues, we don’t edit the author’s voice, tone, or delivery. We edit for spelling, mechanics, grammar, typos, and trust us, that’s a vital and time consuming job. Together, our editing staff makes more than 35,000 (!) corrections, each day, to the books they work on that day.
The problem is that authors NEED someone to EDIT for VOICE, TONE and DELIVERY!!! In my opinion, those are more important issues to a story than measly spelling, mechanics, grammar and typo problems.
Tex’s Bloody Ground needed another serious editing pass before publication which falls on the author’s shoulders. It was really difficult to read because of poor word choice, abrupt transitions and many sentences didn’t make sense.
“Groovy lips” do not work in a western. While the literal sense of groovy as in “pertaining to a groove” is from 1853 the meaning of first-rate/excellent isn’t until 1937. Groovy lips instantly made me think of the Hippie era. That is just one example. The book is riddled with strange word choices.
Many switches in time are abrupt. Transitions are important as they aid the reader in following the story. Along the same lines as transitions, many sentences didn’t make sense. In a chase scene, men were chasing Tex and then later he was gaining on them bound for bound. What?
This story was so riddled with errors I couldn’t judge the quality of the story-line or character development or theme.
Needless to say, I give Tex’s Bloody Ground 1 out of 5 stars. I hate giving one star reviews. However, I couldn’t make heads or tails of this story so I honestly don’t have a choice.
