I’m still working my way through the pile of World Fantasy Con books. Glenn Meganck’s George & The Angels was next up. It’s from Beachfront Publishing which I’m guessing is some kind of vanity press, because this work wasn’t ready for publishing. In fact, it read like a first draft, minus most of the typos. There’re tons of punctuation errors, horrible and nonsensical POV shifts and an overall rough and unpolished feel to it.

As for the story itself…it’s a mess. Imagine sitting down with a young child and asking them to tell you a story, and that’s what you get in George & The Angels. More or less random events strung out in a line that points generally to an ending. We have George going on a quest and a basic theme of him having to defeat an ultimate bad-guy, and that’s where things stop making sense. Characters and creatures appear and disappear with absolutely no logic or consistency. About two thirds of the way through another world is introduced for no apparent reason. Some characters just kind of fall by the wayside, such as George’s wife, who is called “Elaine” in some chapters, but “Mrs. Richards” whenever the children are on-stage. We see her struggle with George’s disappearance for a while, then she just gets discarded, never to be seen again.

To make matters worse, George is one of those ‘constantly carried along by events’ characters that never really does anything to make you like him. In fact, the only remotely likeable characters in the story are his kids. The world is too much of a mish-mosh for you ever to get enough of a handle on it to enjoy being there. If you really enjoy trippy weird stories that are all topsy-turvy, go read Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland.

Mr. Meganck obviously has a vivid imagination and a lot of potential, but it seems to me like he’s not willing to do the hard work of writing, and so has tried to cut corners by self-publishing. (I don’t know for a fact that this is self-published but it looks as if this small press might even be owned by Meganck and one or two other authors.) You, dear reader, deserve to be treated better. Avoid this one like the plague.