A Terrifically Weird Book
A few weeks ago, I visited the local King Soopers (Kroger’s brand name along the Colorado Front Range). There was a guy with a display of books by the customer service desk.
The guy turned out to be the author of the books on display, Terry Mark. It was a Sunday morning, nobody else was around, so Mr Mark pitched his books, hard. All of his descriptions of his books were manic, but the pitch for And the Sun Goeth Down was by far the most lunatic, something like:
General Pershing, Teddy Roosevelt and Ernest Hemingway fight Victor Frankenstein’s zombie army in northern Mexico just before the US enters World War 1. Steampunk and alternate history abound.
I’m paraphrasing, that’s not an exact quote of his description. Terry Mark himself seemed like a personable, nice guy, even if his projected author persona is “Steampunk Weirdo”.
Anyway, I bought And the Sun Goeth Down directly from Mark. The physical book is extremely “indy”, without a publisher’s imprint. It does have a copyright notice (© 2019), and an ISBN: 9781706520337. Cover art is by Lee Oaks.
The book is reasonably well written. I didn’t have any trouble following the plot, or staying engaged. I hesitate to criticize it at all, it takes a lot of guts to self-publish one book, much less many books, and to put up a display of them in public, and pitch them directly to readers. Mr Mark, I salute you for that! Bravo!
It did have some flaws. Typos are rampant. There’s some of the “Well, it passed Word’s spell check” category. There’s some leftover pasted-in author’s notes. There’s missing punctuation. There’s some inexplicable text insertions.
There’s a few missing explanations. The book never really explains the green, glowing “vim” mineral or crystal, or how Victor Frankenstein discovered it or was informed of it. It’s never revealed how Frankenstein animates all the zombies, or why they’re dressed as Aztec warriors. Frankenstein is depicted as having a wife/mate, and a son, but their dispositions are kind of lost at the end of the book.
All-in-all, I’m glad I bought and read And the Sun Goeth Down.
The phrase “and the sun goeth down” is an example of information camouflage. All you get from asking DuckDuckGo about it, is Ecclesiastes 1:5-9, from The Bible. Google is a bit better, referencing the book’s Amazon page only a few down. Google does seem to think the phrase is definitely from Ecclesiastes, though.