Dead Eye: Pennies for The Ferryman

Dead Eye: Pennies for the Ferryman
Jim Bernheimer
Gryphonwood Press, 2009
ISBN: 978-0-9795738-8-0
258 pages
eBook/Print
Paranormal/humour

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Meet Mike Ross, who if it wasn’t for bad luck wouldn’t have any luck at all. He’s been forcibly retired from the army thanks to a roadside bomb and some defective parts, namely a mangled leg, the loss of hearing in one ear and a cornea transplant. These days, Mike, 23 years old, still lives with mom and is attending college.

Did I mention that Mike also sees ghosts with his repaired eye? And he can talk to them, befriend them, fight with them, hurt and be hurt by them. Mike can even kill a ghost: it seems he’s what’s known as a ferryman, someone with the ability to assist ghosts (pleasantly or forcibly) to cross over to the other side (of the symbolic river Styx).

And are there ghosts! It would seem that an entire shadow culture exists parasitically on the living and on other ghosts. There are friendly ghosts, murderous ghosts, political ghosts, mobster ghosts, even ghosts with the ability to possess the living.

As a ferryman, both ghosts and people expect Mike to help them with their problems. Mike’s issue with his new powers, and the obligations which seem to go with them, is that he has more problems of his own than he can handle. Why should he also take on the problems of the dead, most of whom can’t pay him for his troubles?

Follow “Dead Eye” Mike in his comical, anti-hero pursuit of a normal life in a world gone completely mad. This is one ghost story that won’t scare you—unless you’re afraid to laugh out loud from whatever corner or niche you find to sit and read about Mike’s antics.

I enjoyed Dead Eye. It’s different: unpretentious, fun and interesting. Jim Bernheimer put a lot of thought and effort into his unique version of the world of ghosts, and I think the novel works well as a whole.

Unfortunately, I believe some people are going to find Mike Ross a little too flippant to be convincing and the book a little too light for the paranormal genre. There were a number of times I felt the scenes would have played better if the danger felt more real. I also became tired of Mike playing down his abilities, then coming through as being unstoppable. Bernheimer’s choice(s) didn’t ring true in these instances. Now, the last few comments may just be my own personal tastes showing through, yet there is one set of problems with the novel the author should think long and hard about: there were countless grammatical errors a good editor or proof reader should have caught, specifically a tendency to mix tenses within paragraphs. There’s way too much of this kind of thing coming out of small publishing houses today. If we (yes, I’m a small publisher) want to be taken seriously, then we better damn well make sure our books are just as well written and error free as the Top 25 novels in any bookstore.

Keep on writing Mr. Bernheimer: you can spin a yarn with the best of them. All you need now is to demand editing of the same calibre.


Copyright © Clayton Clifford Bye 2010