Mr Jingles

A Horror Novel

By: T. L. Bowns

Narrated by: Lynn Benson

Have you checked on your children?

When the lights go out and the city sleeps, a monster preys on the children of Henderson. The little girl next door to Debbie Swanson disappears from her bed, the next day the child's body is found in the river. Debbie may hold the key to what is happening in Henderson, but it is locked away in a childhood memory so terrifying that to remember could destroy her sanity.

©2012 T.L. Bowns (P)2012 T.L. Bowns

Good idea, weak execution

What would have made Mr Jingles better?

This book can't decide whether it wants to be a ghost story or a tale about a maniac. The ending is confusing - the explanations are smashed together and it ultimately left me unsure exactly who was doing the deeds. If the author's intent was to leave some doubt, he left me more with a feeling of not understanding, as opposed to subjectiveness.

Furthermore, the very end reads as though a chapter was just cut off from the end of the book. Rather than a feeling of "the story's not over", it was simply unsatisfactory and hastily slapped together.

Also, the author really beat the dead horse in terms of one character repeatedly attributing all of her premonitions to her anxiety and imagination. It went from repetitious to just plain tedious.i

The author had a good idea that was executed weakly.

What was most disappointing about T. L. Bowns’s story?

First, the editing was very poor. When a new section or chapter began, it would start without any pause, sometimes so close to the end of a sentence that it sounded as though there was no punctuation. This was usually jarring, in part because a new section almost always changed character perspectives.

Second, the narrator had no emotion to his voice, nor did it ever change. There was little effort to even change his voice for different characters. The performance was more like the reading of a cereal box's ingredients.