Dreamland Review Archive

Relapse (T)

Relapse written by foryourgorereads

i. COVER & TITLE

Your cover is definitely unique and interesting, and it drew me in and intrigued me. With that being said, I think there's potential for it to become more professional. If you send the image you currently have to a designer, they might be able to make the cover more snappy. I have a multitude of cover shops in my reading list that with give you exactly what you need. Your title obviously reflects the story, but it is rather generic. I do like the whole one-liner thing though. That being said, I would try to rework your title and find something that also represents the story, but is a little more original.

ii. BLURB

Your blurb has strong potential, but I found it super long. There are numerous things you can do to clean up your blurb, and they're all easy things. The truth is, all the things you said in your blurb seemed important at first. I took a long time trying to compact your sentences into the essential information. This blurb is longer than what I usually recommend, but your story requires a tad bit of extra explanation. So after a while, I managed to slim it down to this:

Death is a reoccurrence and life is but a toy.

The regeneration of the body after death, known as the Relapse, has led people to end their life in bizarre ways for the purpose of amusement--opposing the beliefs of a prominent group of people: the Restorationists.

The Restorationists believe that God, in His wrath, might one day remove the power of the Relapse from the world if it continues to be abused. These warnings are ignored until one day, the power of the Relapse does disappear--causing absolute mayhem and frenzy. Through the haze of chaos rises a newer generation of Restorationists, determined to lead a monarchy under the ideologies of the original Restorationists, which are all but peaceful.

But there's hope yet--starting with seventeen-year-old Xander and his resilient group of friends, determined to re-obtain the power of the Relapse and dig deep into the meaning and truth of it all.

So basically what I did here was write and rewrite, work and rework the sentences until it was slimmed down. I think I managed to get all the essential info in there, but it's more organized and to-the-point. I hope I sort of kept the vibes you wanted in there. This is something you could do on your own as well, but it required a lot of reworking. Other than the length and overflow of information, the blurb had an awesome structure to work with. 

0 9  / 1 5