With cosmic stakes, shapeshifting aliens, and a man going backward through time, the story is often bursting at the seams.

The humor and promise of a very interesting premise are what initially drew me into reading Eighth Resonance by Randy Kabitz. Mind-controlling, shapeshifting parasites from another planet slowly infiltrating the world governments and giving a real reason why everything is so going downhill right now? Sign me up! That there was a femme fatale feeling character almost drew me in from the very beginning as well.

The delivery on the premise was satisfactory, and I did find the majority of the characters worthy of rooting for until the very end. However, there were many things that made the story difficult for me to finish in the long run. From the very first scene involving one of the alien parasites, the Iter-Pestim, I had more questions than answers. And those same questions persisted until the latter third of the novel. While that can often be a solid tactic to help keep readers scanning each new page for clues to the solution or the actual solutions themselves, much of the information being left up in the air felt needlessly withheld at times. The very first description of an alien we get is of something with both scales and fur. Then the next has tentacles and the one after that, wings. The differences are addressed at one point, but not until maybe the last 50 pages of a story spanning over 300.

Because of that ever-changing description, it was hard for me to get a handle on exactly what kind of danger the protagonists were dealing with. It also led to some drastic differences in the power levels exhibited by the aliens. Scope and pacing were also real issues for me, a sense of urgency building in one scene only to be deflated by a seemingly random time skip in the next. In much the same way, the deaths of some characters seemed to happen more for shock value than to add to the story. The escalation of *everything* also felt just too convenient. Though the humor is what pulled me in, it could be overused at points with the characters often feeling like they were just caricatures of themselves from other scenes.

Overall, I do still consider this story one worth reading purely because there are some extraordinary parts despite the issues above. Eighth Resonance covers virtually all the bases of what you could want from a science-fiction novel. Unfortunately, I feel it tries to cover too many bases at once.

Eighth Resonance by Randy Kabitz is available to buy on Amazon.

Verdict:

RANTABLE