"As he sat there watching the waves wash up on the beach, John’s mind went back in time."
 |
My Living Hell by Joseph E. Cocker Trafford Publishing
book review by Omar Figueras
Joseph E. Coker's My Living Hell is a story about a man, John Martin, who is shot and is later suspected and accused of trying to commit suicide. Because of said crime, he is unjustly institutionalized by his family. John suffers all sorts of torments for no reason whatsoever other than picking the wrong business partner. Mr. Hanz is an investor who is interested in John's business proposal, and the catalyst to John's torment. But the woes John suffers in his topsy-turvy life did not start here.
As written by Coker, John faced a hard childhood as his father was shot by thieves during a bank robbery. Subsequently, John and his sisters were raised at the hands of their domineering mother. In his book, Coker created a world for his protagonist in which the odds are stacked against him and there is slim to no chance of his being able to overcome them.
Told in six chapters of solid text, lacking paragraph indentations or properly utilized quotation marks, Coker's technique was a bit too experimental. The story is entertaining, but the author's free-form prose and disregard of technical basics were pushed to the limit of punctuation, spelling, and grammar. These distractions divert the reader's focus away from the action. Although Coker's intentions of telling a story of one man's Herculean struggles in life are well meant, the story falls short due to errors of execution.