Virtual Insanity by Charlie Dalton.
Synopsis… “Four friends celebrate a stag weekend at Virtual Insanity, a cutting-edge virtual reality company. Built on a disused military research facility, the futuristic headsets scan existing landscapes and re-imagines them with post-apocalyptic environments. They battle zombies, overcome obstacles, and fight to stay alive. But when one member of the team falls off the grid, he uncovers a secret even the game’s designers aren’t aware of”.
Overall rating 3 out of 5 stars.
My review…
I have mixed feelings about this book, the premise sounded excellent and I was hooked straight away just from the description. However, I can only describe it as if you saw a film trailer, then watched the film only to realise they put all the best bits in the actual trailer and the rest was, well, shit.
I was intrigued by this book to start with, I’m a big fan of VR technology and so as soon as I saw this would feature heavily in the book I was desperate to read it. The technology seemed simple enough and didn’t go into too much detail that would turn people off reading it.
As the book progressed though my enjoyment waned. The dialogue was very clunky, it was always “he said” after every sentence and for a group of people supposed to be friends I didn’t get that feeling from their interactions.
The characters themselves were interesting enough, and there was an underlying tension between two of them which added another level to the story – though I guessed what that would be from the start, it was a little too obvious.
Whilst the book did leave us guessing with what was real and wasn’t real it also left us with a lot of other unanswered questions and unfulfilled potential. I feel the author could have put more time into developing the story and giving the readers something to get stuck into.
On the whole, Virtual Insanity was different and certainly made good use of up and coming tech to enhance the story but it left me feeling empty with a lack of explanations and a poor ending.
Let me know if you’ve read this book as I’d love to hear what you thought!
Em xxx
What Em's Reading 