Tuesday, October 30, 2018

Review: OBLIQUE by Neal Vandar


"I was fourteen years old the first time I killed a man." Even though the kid was saving a girl from being raped and murdered, "that's not the way justice works."

Twenty-five years later, the same girl he rescued contacts him again. The night the two meet at the restaurant, terror and confusion strike―suddenly, everyone in the place is dead, including the girl he saved when they were kids. What happened here? And why was there no mention of this tragic incident in the news? Was it his imagination? "It certainly [was] an oblique situation"―devious and misleading.

In this tale, one disoriented man makes a mad and desperate attempt to find the truth and what was real. He becomes a paranoid mess.

Simple and strangely compelling. You can't help but wonder if all this was real or if the man was just going crazy. But then it goes from weird to weirder. I mean, who checks into a motel one night and wakes up outside a forest lodge? I'm like, "Huh?" Throughout the whole thing, you feel like you're going just as crazy as the character. I mean, nothing was making any sense. You're just lost and confused the whole way.

But then our hero somehow finds himself in a far-away town, where he sees a 25-year old picture of a girl that went missing―the very same girl he had dinner with 3 nights ago. What? Turns out that girl had died shortly after she went missing. Oh snap!

This strange case of a disillusioned man and his "ghostly" encounter with a dead girl and his grim realities was just too good of a concept; however, at times, it can be a little too confusing and there was often a lag. Story ultimately follows the trail of paranoia and a lost mystery. I couldn't help but wonder if the guy was just fooling himself and wasting time on something that wasn't really there. I enjoyed the mystery aspect and saw the potential in it, but I wasn't too keen on the overall progression.  

My rating: 3 stars

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