Nightmare Ballad by Benjamin Kane Etheridge

I just finished reading "Nightmare Ballad" by Benjamin Kane Etheridge. It was a good book - I'd probably give it 3.5 stars if I could do halves-but only cause it takes a bit to get the story "really" going. It starts off with the first "nightmare" within the first few pages & I was hooked from there, wanting to continue & see what all this stuff was about. And one thing that was really mind-boggling was that once the "nightmare" was over, ordinary people just "accepted" elements of the nightmare as being perfectly "normal" - i.e. There being "frogmen" in a school swimming pool was perceived as being completely acceptable. (No wonder people died, afterall there were frogmen in the pool!)

But after that fascinating opening, I was a bit disappointed at the next 80 pages or so. There were four main characters throughout the book: Luke & Mara are a married couple who meet & fall in love with another woman, Maribel. The three form a 3-way marriage that they are very happy with-it's society who has the problem accepting them. The fourth character is Johnny, who is twice divorced & has a son, who doesn't live with him anymore.

What disappointed me was that after the interesting beginning nightmare, the next 80 pages or so were just "regular" stuff....it was Luke discussing his office & how it was difficult for people to understand the marriage situation he had chosen to be in. However, the book read "smoothly"..my interest didn't falter too much & it was easy reading. It's not that the personal stuff wasn't "interesting", I just was wanting to really get into the "juicy" nightmare stuff, and the long "interlude" of discussing the domestic situation left me feeling like the author should have done a whole book on THAT & saved the nightmare material for its own book.

Well, finally when Johnny goes to a yard to steal some copper..boy, it "really" picks up then! And it gets progressively better & better! Once you get to the mid-way mark, there's no stopping you! The nightmares are so fascinating & it's about that point where the characters start talking to each other & comparing notes to try and figure out what the heck is going on?? Towards the end, it really gets interesting & the ending is totally unexpected! It made me want to go back & reread it to see how it all fits together!

Now just to give some readers a "heads-up" on what to expect. All the places in the story involving Johnny have quite a bit of cussing, mostly the "F" word. Also, within the nightmares....let's just call it "Adult Material" and leave it at that. However, nothing really grossed me out or made me want to stop reading.

MY RATING: 4 out of 5 Stars