Sound could have used more editing

A SOUND LIKE FIRE

By KD Veron

West Bow Press, $30.95;
353 pp.

For Christians, the end of times is a fascinating topic. Many want to envision what the Rapture and the Apocalypse will be like. Many study the biblical book of Revelation, trying to apply it to things happening in modern times.

And often, they write fiction based on these musings.

Louisiana author KD Veron has done that with his self-published A Sound Like Fire.

The book tells of Dax Soileau, a senator and high-level Freemason from Louisiana. Dax becomes caught up in his powerful life and avoids his home state and family as much as possible. He prefers his mistress and the things that money gets him. His children turn away from even the pretense of a Christian life. In the meantime, his brother becomes an evangelist and spends much of his time warning Dax that the end is coming and that Dax needs to get right with God.

After a 1963 prologue, most of the story is told through flashbacks. It starts with Dax in prison in Jerusalem in July 2020. Telling stories keeps prisoners occupied. He tells of his inside view of the political maneuvers that led to the antichrist having control. And if you have been in any church study of end times, you know how the story ends. Overall, Veron’s story is solid. It follows typical end-times patterns from other fiction. However, A Sound Like Fire is full of the standard, stereotypical bogeymen of fundamentalist evangelical Christians: Freemasons, New Age, yoga, Democrats, Muslims, Secular Humanists, drugs, rock music and, of course, the ACLU. And feeling more like script instructions than flowing prose.

While not as severe as some, Veron’s book suffers from the same woes as many self-published books: It is marked with misspelled or incorrect words, bad punctuation, factual mistakes and other editing problems. For instance, a gravy was described as “brown rue,” it mentions “Marshall law” and “gorilla warfare.”

So a note to all who want to self-publish: Hire a professional editor. In this instance, a professional editor would have caught the mistakes and would have encouraged rewrites, helping tighten the pace of the story and smoothing clunky passages.