Cult of the Eclipse, Book Review

Cult of the Eclipse by author, Winfield Winfield

Thanks to author Winfield Winfield for providing me with a copy of his novel is exchange for this honest review.

Cult of the Eclipse is a horror novel that attempts to build lore of a digital age cult but always winds up back at the basics everyone has already seen.

The Eclipse mentioned in the title is an Apple like tech giant. It’s a company founded by an esoteric leader who has his hands in aboslutely anything tech related. People have spread rumors about this leader even being able to heal physical ailments. His allure builds a sort of underground cult.

I really do like the idea of a cult surrounding tech giant hero worship. It doesn’t seem too far from reality when you see people fan boy over Elon Musk. However, Elon Musk doesn’t need to heal anyone to have a draw. And the cult leader in Cult of the Eclipse never really utilizes that power in any way that is meaningful to the reader.

There are many things mentioned in this book that don’t come to fruition. Chekhov’s gun is something that’s always on my radar as a reader, Cult of the Eclipse has Winfield’s tazer. It’s infuriating to me that the protagonist, Jaclyn, is consistently referred to as carrying a tazer and it is not once used! Then why even mention it?!

Tazers aside, the book is full of loose ends and unanswered questions. The book is marketed as the first in a “Deadly Sins” series so maybe the questions will be answered then but I don’t even know what this first book has to do with the deadly sins so then again maybe not.

In addition to needing strong content editing Cult of the Eclipse needs basic typeface editing as well. It’s absolutely littered with typos and grammatical errors. I typically give a few of these kinds of errors a pass but the ones on these pages changed the context meaning more than once and that’s an author’s deadly sin.

So anyway, throughout the book Jaclyn is searching for her missing son while also trying to not resort to alcohol to numb her pain. She seems to be searching for him at random with no clues and no help. She starts to get sucked into the mystery of the cult and then there’s a twisty ending. But also not a very strong ending because everything has a sequel nowadays.

I think Cult of the Eclipse has a small bit of promise burried within this current print. I felt like I read a very early draft that needs quite a bit of work before it should be published. I think the author jumped Chekhov’s gun with publishing it in this state. I’d give it another chance after an exhastive rewrite but as it stands now I don’t think I’m interested in the rest of the series.

2/5 moon eclipses 🌘🌘

For some great indie horror check out Goodbye, Moonflower

And for more indie book reviews check out Metasentient

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Buy it here: Cult of the Eclipse (Deadly Sins Book 1)