| REVIEWED BY FROST |
| "Vince" by J. M. Snyder |
| Rating: 3 Swords Vince J. M. Snyder www.lulu.com , November 2003 ISBN 978-1-4116-0291-5 Trade Paperback Ebook, Fictionwise, March 2007 151 pp. Three Swords Vince is a young man harboring a volcano. A seething morass of hatred, rage, lust, and latent violence, Vince seems to be trouble waiting to erupt. Son of a dull and bigoted upper-class suburban home, Vince goes faux Goth to dissociate himself from his family and neighborhood. Almost all of Vince’s longing, lust and rage goes back to his childhood friend Eric and the incident that separated them seemingly forever. Vince and golden-boy Eric grew up inseparable. Homes separated by only a few intervening neighbors, they practically shared houses, parents, and siblings. They were as tight as could be until age fourteen when Vince almost inadvertently revealed his feelings—and Eric laughed, near-hysterically. Fleeing in humiliation, Vince never spoke to Eric again for years. His nights were filled with longing and lust in dreams of Eric, his days were occupied with daydreams of brutally punishing Eric into submission. But the Wheel of Life has a persistent method of returning us to lessons we haven’t fully learned, and people we thought we were forever done with reappear to pester us into experiencing what we thought we’d lost. Vince is rife with suppressed violent and high emotional drama. The character of Vince is very well developed, and the reader definitely comes to know him from the inside out. I thought the character of Eric was less so, and did not feel I came to know him. Certainly I wasn’t able to appreciate him the way Vince does (that is, when Vince is not in his raging mode determined to punish Eric). I think the point for me was that I simply didn’t find Eric sufficiently worthy of all the angst Vince puts himself through. Vince has talent as a filmmaker, he receives early acceptance and a scholarship, and with application he could apply his angst and drama into his art. For this reason I didn’t appreciate the ending, which seemed to me to be a sidetrack. Now this is of course only my own personal opinion. Vince is well worth reading. Any works by J. M. Snyder are worth the reader’s time. Additionally, I quite liked the character of Vince, who resonated sympathetically with me. If you would like to be Reviewed by Frost, send an email to frost@jlfoster.biz or reviewed_by_frost@jlfoster.biz with the subject line "Submission." Include the author's name, title of book, publishing house, genre, page count, and an excerpt. |
