Rapper Joey Steffano, best known for his alter-ego "Crack Boy," is killed in concert and finds himself on a mysterious train ride through a dark and dangerous place, struggling to figure out what happened and what the train's apparent owner, Franklin J. Merryhill, wants from him. At the same time, his darker half, Crack Boy, is struggling on foot through a perilous landscape, fighting to reach a city he can't enter and plagued by angels he doesn't want to hear.
Dark Tales of Time and Space is a confusing short novel aimed for young adult readers that addresses personal responsiblity in life and in death. If the novel simply followed Joey Steffano as he struggles with narcissism and denial, it would be an easier (if somewhat clichéd) read. However, soon after entering the train Joey is split in half, and Crack Boy, a fictional rap personage turned living embodiment of all in Joey that is actively evil, has his own bizarre adventures in a timeless and alien world that bears no direct relationship to the spacescape Merryhill's train is traversing. Crack Boy's adventures are more intriguing than Joey's, but his unexplained mutilation and sudden shifts from place to place add more questions than they answer. Moreover, while Joey's story reaches a conclusion, Crack Boy's fate is never satisfactorily resolved.
For some reason, lengthy "newspaper articles" about political and natural disasters have been inserted throughout the novel. The author's introduction notes that he wrote the novel at the same time that these events were happening, but the articles, most of which run a page and a half in length, are nothing but awkward interruptions that add to the novel's page count and do nothing to further its plot. One might expect that the disasters being described in the articles would eventually give Joey deeper insight into his own condition or propel him toward emotional or spiritual growth, but they don't—Joey's character development is entirely independent of the excerpts. In the end one can only wonder why an editor didn't pull out a red pencil and scratch through these useless digressions from the storyline.
The novel's intentions are noble. What better way to entice young adults to think about moral responsibility and the afterlife than through a rap-star protagonist in a novel that doesn't shy away from references to drug addiction and sex? But Dark Tales of Time and Space fails to achieve its goal—the plot is muddled and poorly paced and the characters are one-dimensional and reactive. While some of the novel's images are quite striking—I won't soon forget the vision of Crack Boy firing his Smith & Wesson at a hovering angel—they just can't redeem this novel from its overall incoherence.
). It is my personal opinion that his books are as repetitive in there storylines as James Bond movies (the ones I have read anyway), I think that most of the books in the netforce series are rude, and to me, they are monotinous, but this is not my kind of book anyway and I have only read two so don't take my word on it, you might like them.
