Liverpool Sound and Vision Rating 9/10
When good things end, there is not much the reader can do except think back over the enormity of what they have mentally digested and rejoice in the life they have witnessed being unveiled, or weep silently at just how privileged they have been to be allowed time in someone else’s thoughts and reasoning.
Art allows us to feel the desire of comfort and the dislocation of Time that disturbs our senses, often in equal measure. The art of writing, and it is an art that needs to be treasured in a world filled with the vacuous and the vain, is one that willingly takes the reader to places that they will never see, and the best of writers, those scribes to whom who we notice observing the space between time, are those that create a story worth living in.
Bob Stone’s ‘Beat‘ trilogy may well have started out as a fiction for young adults, however with its own sense of mystery, modern myth layering and a group of characters that endear themselves completely to the reader, the story of Joey Cale is one that deserves to be read throughout and by all.
The trilogy ends with perhaps the sound of a heart having been put through time itself, the sense of wanting to belong, the alienation derived from having done the right thing, but to which others will only ever believe the worst, the Perfect Beat of denial and loss that, no matter who we are, we can empathise with completely.
Whilst alienation and loss is very much at the forefront of the narrative, the sense of fear that comes with any quest in which followers fall, in which much loved characters meet their ends at the hands of evil, there is also between the cover a sense of gratifying loyalty, of strength, honour and resolution to which the reader pours their own emotional retelling and immerses themselves into the narrative with ease, with pleasure.
Perfect Beat, as well as the other two books in the trilogy, is a representation of excellent writing caught up in the mind of passion, a writer who arguably feels responsible for every word that is placed down, taking to task the world as it has become, and instead offers, as with Stephen King in The Stand, hope; it might not be the hope you seek, but it is the one that will see you through the tough times you find yourself.
A tremendously gripping and engrossing novel, Perfect Beat once again sees Bob Stone deliver a story of wealth, humour, pathos and experience.
Bob Stone’s Perfect Beat is out now and available to purchase from Write Blend in Waterloo, Merseyside, or from Beaten Track Publishing.
Ian D. Hall