After Dark started out well. It had good intentions and a nice chat up at the bar. The description reads as follows: "When he was five, Sebastian Periera watched The Target beat up a bank robber. Ever since then, he's wanted to be a superhero. Now a teenager, he's chasing the dream. As the water-controlling psychic vigilante called Torrent, he prowls the streets of Pittsburgh, doing his best to right wrongs and keep his double life a secret. But life in the mask brings more challengers than he anticipated, and even dual superpowers aren't always enough. Besides facing down the street thugs, monsters, and madmen, he's got to master his hormones and keep his conscience. With help from his paranormally gifted crush and thrill-seeker best friend, he just might make it -- and they just might make the best superhero team in the Burgh."
See? Good intentions, a little mysterious, a little exciting. All the things that a girl like myself is looking for in an evening's entertainment. My only issue here is that a word seems to be missing. "... and keep his conscience CLEAR." is how I think that should go. Otherwise, he's just keeping his conscious as though it tends to wander off like an errant puppy. Not hard to contain, but fairly difficult to keep clear. This doesn't give me a great sense of confidence about the rest of the story, as the description is the absolute-most-important-thing-to-get-right if you want sales, but we will see. I give it a C for that, but would upgrade to a B if that little detail was fixed.
On to the cover. I like the cover. It feels very comic-bookish and that's something that I can get behind. I especially like the rain, and how it's going around our hero due to his powers instead of getting him all wet. He looks fairly scuffed up, as though he just stopped some evil-doer, but also looks like he liberated a football helmet from the high school field house in the process. I'm not sure how I feel about that. It would be nice to get some action on the cover though, or at least a little something to hint at what's going to happen in the book. All in all, B- for the cover.
On to the actual meat of the story. It was entertaining, although it didn't quite keep my attention at times. I read a lot of it all at once, then put it down halfway through and didn't pick it back up for about 2 months, and I'm not entirely positive why. I only noticed a few (like 2) little typos, missing words, etc, but nothing that really stood out at me. I mentally edited over them without noticing the first time around, but there were several looooong sentences that pulled me out of the story. They are probably grammatically correct, but could have been broken up a little better.
Parts of this novel made me laugh, and that's always great. The hero, Sebastian, has a very witty internal dialogue going. The story changes POV once during the whole book, which threw me a little, but was still cohesive and entertaining. I would have liked more from Eva's POV (Sebastian's crush), or at least more from the third person POV for continuity. The rest of the book is written from the first person in Sebastian's voice. I'd give the story itself a B, and the pacing/ occasional odd verbage a C, as it sometimes felt slow to me. There is a lot of walking around school or home while talking to Eva that wasn't necessarily exciting.
After Dark had an interesting addition to it that I haven't seen in many other full-length novels - artwork. The art is sporadic, but always a nice little addition to the story. The pictures look like frames of a comic strip, keeping in line with the cover. The only issue that I saw with these was that the Kindle previewing function doesn't show all of the pictures correctly - some are rotated the wrong way. When I read the book on my Kindle app for ipad, they were all facing the correct way, but each took up its own page. I'm not sure if they were supposed to, as they weren't the same size as the whole page, but didn't integrate into the text at all. They were still fun to see, though. I give the art an A-.
Overall, I'd give After Dark a C+. It's a good story, albeit a little slow at times. I'm curious as to how the story plays out in subsequent books.
