Beneath Magenta Rain RANT Review
Beneath Magenta Rain is a short story set in a cyberpunk universe where people who are deemed to be imperfect by an oppressive government are dropped to the lowest member of the society’s caste system. It won an award, but… should it have? In this review, I will be closely analyzing both this short story and its author, as well as the award it was granted prior to its release. This is going to be a bit of a rant, so strap yourselves in and get ready for some… angry content.
Summary
I will start off with a summary of this book if you somehow do not know anything about it—which would be odd, I mean… everyone I know is reading it. However, I’ll approach this review with the assumption that you know nothing about this story. First of all, this is an eBook, and it’s an Amazon exclusive. That means you can only find it on Amazon, but you don’t need to have a Kindle to read it. As long as you have a device that supports the Kindle app, you’ll be able to read it. Kindle Unlimited subscribers can read the eBook for free while others only have to pay $3.99. There isn’t a physical edition of the book, but I hear the author plans to release an anthology.
In this book, we follow a character who is an imperfect in his society, which essentially means that he is a slave within the oppressive world in which he suffers. The reason he’s been designated as imperfect is the limp that he has, and he has several people around him who are imperfects for different reasons. His lover is one of them—she’s imperfect because she’s missing an eye, which is pretty grim.
To make matters even darker, our main character is a slave at a brothel, forced to entertain clients of the brothel against his will. We’re off to a dark start, but it just gets darker with each page as we discover not only how awful things are within the brothel but about how awful things are beyond the brothel’s walls. This is a bleak, grim world. Truthfully, there isn’t much happiness or hope in this book, though it is about our protagonist seeking to escape from his slavery… so maybe there’s a little hope.
Writing
This book received an Honorable Mention from the Writers of the Future competition in 2021. This is the same competition that gave us writers like Patrick Rothfuss. Additionally, this isn’t the author’s first award from this competition: he’s received two other Honorable Mentions. After reading this book, I’m really not sure what the judges at Writers of the Future are smoking. T. L. Bainter’s writing is absolute drivel. It’s so approachable and straightforward, rather than challenging and difficult to comprehend, which is what all writing should strive to achieve. I seriously understood every sentence without having to read it twice, which is a sign that a book is not good.
To make matters worse, he doesn’t even include a dialogue tag for every single line of dialogue. If I don’t have it stated clearly after every line of dialogue who was just speaking, I completely lose track of the conversation. At one point, there was so much tagless dialogue that I burst into tears. Tears! Big, gushing, anime tears. It was intense. So, definitely giving the author an F on his ability to write dialogue.
Structure
So, when the author stated that this is a short story, I thought that he meant, you know, three or four hundred pages. That’s a short story. But, no, it’s like… a really short story. I read the entire book, start to finish, in a single hour and a half sitting. That’s unacceptable. What am I supposed to do with my day after I finish a book? Start another one? Go for a walk? I was absolutely unprepared for finishing this book in such an expedient manner. I had blocked out my whole day for reading this short story. Once it was done, I had to figure out what to do with the rest of my day, which I’m certainly not grateful for.
I wish the author had given us a warning of some kind at the beginning of the book so that I could have planned my day more effectively. Yeah, I know that Kindles give you an approximate reading time based on your own reading speed, but I don’t think that’s reliable so I just ignore it.
Content
Let it be known that this book is dark. There’s a fade to black for many things, but it’s still just a really grim, disheartening book. Everything in the world is bleak and sad. There’s tension, abuse, and all sorts of other content in this book. It isn’t overwhelming, and I don’t think it crosses into grimdark territory at all, but it definitely deals with some heavy and challenging stuff. The focus of the story seems to be on consent in multiple situations, which is something that needs to be discussed, but like… I didn’t want to read about it. I only like reading about things that are easy to talk about, like kittens and tea parties.
The Author
Without taking a minute to really dig at the author, this wouldn’t be a rant review. First of all, the author’s name is T. L. Bainter. What do the T and L stand for? What is he hiding? Why won’t he give us his whole name? Is he a spy? Is it a pen name? Who the heck is he? Who is T. L. Bainter? What secrets does he think he’s protecting? How are we supposed to trust an author who only gives his last name?
To add to this author’s many transgressions, he’s also making a fake rant review video! For his own short story! On his own YouTube channel! He’s pretending to rant but he isn’t actually ranting, he’s just making stuff up to help give his own book more traction? What kind of person does that? An absolute tool, that’s the kind of person who does that. I hope he sells zero copies of this short story after the video goes live.
Overall Rating
For Beneath Magenta Rain, It’s going to come as no surprise what my rating for this book is. It’s a Kindle exclusive, it’s a short story that’s extraordinarily short, it has won an award it doesn’t deserve, and most of the people I know are reading it without actually posting any reviews for it (that means it’s bad). Additionally, it deals with challenging topics and is a bleak book rather than a super happy cheerful one, which means it makes me think about and feel things that I’d rather not. All in all, I have to give this book one star, which is more than it deserves.
Conclusion
Thank you very much for checking out my review for Beneath Magenta Rain, I greatly appreciate it! Obviously, this is my short story and I would love it if you’d take some time to check it out, give it a read, and leave an honest review for it. However, if all you can do is give this video some attention, I really appreciate that, too! Thanks again for checking this post out, I’m incredibly grateful!