Limbus, Inc.

By: Jonathan Maberry, Brett J. Talley, Joseph Nassise, Benjamin Kane Ethridge, Anne C. Petty

Narrated by: Gregory Zarcone

Are you laid off, downsized, undersized?

Call us. We employ. 1-800-555-0606

How lucky do you feel?

So reads the business card from LIMBUS, INC., a shadowy employment agency that operates at the edge of the normal world. LIMBUS's employees are just as suspicious and ephemeral as the motives of the company, if indeed it could be called a company in the ordinary sense of the word.

In this shared-world anthology, five heavy hitters from the dark worlds of horror, fantasy, and sci-fi pool their warped takes on the shadow organization that offers employment of the most unusual kind to those on the fringes of society.

One thing's for sure - you'll never think the same way again about the fine print on your next employment application!

©2013 Journalstone Publishing (P)2016 Journalstone Publishing

Narration is making it hard to get thru this one..

I *love* Jonathan Maberry's work. And I *think* this one is a good one, but the audio is...not good. It's a combination of the lack of timing and inflection of the reader and some really horky editing that makes it seriously hard to follow who's talking and when there's a scene transition. I may end up having to buy the physical or Kindle version and just read it myself.

great set of stories

I really enjoyed this set of stories. If you like weird Twilight Zone type stuff this book is for you

Excellent shared universe anthology!

Came for Jonathan Maberry's contribution and, as always, found a few more authors to add to my queue.

Thr concept here is great and each story stands well alone while tying into the overall plot.

Can't wait to get into the next of these...

Needed a better narrator.

Most of the stories were just okay. The Sam Hunter short story at the end was very good. The narrator has a pleasant voices, but fails to add inflection or take a breath… it’s easy to get lost.

awful performance by narrator

the stories are entertaining, but the enthusiasm and timing of narrator were just awful.

Cool concept, a little uneven, wrong narrator

The concept behind this anthology of scifi terror was a cool one, a heartless corporation that interfaces Planet Earth with the dangerous terrors of extraterrestrial monsters and civilizations. This was reminiscent of the old EC scifi comics.
The central theme running through it all reminds me of Ripley's line from ALIENS. "You don't see THEM fucking each other over for a goddamn percentage."
The stories themselves were a little uneven, but all worthy of attention. Tense and often splashy. Maberry's proved expectedly to be the strongest.
The biggest problem here was the narrator. He didn't perform, he simply read. And worse, his delivery was like a morning radio or game show. These were HORROR stories, and he read them like this was a children's book.
I probably would have liked this better as a print version.

I Wanted to Like It

Would you try another book from the authors and/or Gregory Zarcone?

I really wanted to like this listen but just couldn't get into it. I expected more depth in character, plot and story - seemed like a group of stories all thrown together for a quick hit press, not what I expected from such quality writers. Also the narrator was weak - sounded like he wasn't really getting into it ether. Half hearted.

Creative

Lots of these stories are kind of not my thing, and i think that must lead me to see their flaws more easily. And it's also easy to dislike a story when you can hear grammatical mistakes in the audio version. BUT, the final story in the anthology, by the author who is listed first in the blurb, was really fun. The audio narrator seemed to get on board with that one too, though his reading was not great throughout.

the narrator should be whipped

I don't normally write reviews, but I felt compelled to do a review on this book. I really wanted to like this book but the narrator just destroyed it. the story was interesting enough for me to listen to at least half of the book. the narrator however was complete garbage and destroyed the story. half the time I would get lost because the narrator would not pause at the appropriate times and I have to catch up to scene changes and everything else. I can't stress this enough. the narrator sucked. I can't believe he got paid for this. not only that I can't believe in made through the final edits with this type of narration. did I mention how horrible the narrator was? I'll listen to plenty of books and have not been able to finish some of them do too horrible narration, but I was never compelled to write a review on the horrible narration. whenever I preview this book before I bought it the narrator's voice and everything sounded fine, though I suppose it wasn't enough to identify the lack of enthusiasm and non-narrative abilities this guy had. I would love to listen to this book again with a different narrator. I would probably give it 5 out of 5 stores all the way across and really enjoy it even with a mediocre narrator.

What a Trippy Ride

Would you recommend this audiobook to a friend? If so, why?

I'm not sure if I would recommend this audiobook as most of my friends have very different taste than myself. And this book is a bit of an acquired taste.

What other book might you compare Limbus, Inc. to and why?

I would say it sort of but not exactly reminded me of Stephen King's book Nightmares & Dreamscapes. Only in they both had multiple supernatural and sort of macabre style of short stories in them. But Limbus, Inc. is different from Stephen King's book in the way that Limbus has all tied with one common story line... Limbus, Inc. Employment Agency.

Did the narration match the pace of the story?

No. The narration was lacking. Within each story there were break indicators in the book to show that a shift of scenes was happening. At those breaks the narrator should have paused to indicate to the listener that we were now shifting to a new scene in the story. The narrator would read the last sentence in the last scene but not stopped at the period but rather just ran on to the next sentence that started the next scene. He read it all like it was a run on sentence; which was confusing to me the listener as I tried to listen as I was driving to my destination one afternoon. I had to pause the audio until I came to a stop so I can read the digital book I had of Limbus Inc. to make sense of it all. Because at one moment of the story the character is lying on the floor after making his great escape from the alien shop and the next in the same breath we hear that the character is talking about tasting fruit loops on his teeth and tongue. That left me all kinds of confused.

Was there a moment in the book that particularly moved you?

At the end of the first story "Slaughter Man" when it's divulged that Slaughter Man wasn't going to have the fate he expected and that his sworn enemy was now going to be tasting crow. Plus I liked that it was finally divulged Slaughter Man's real name.

Any additional comments?

The narrator Gregory Zarcone could take a page out of narrator Ann Marie Gideon's page. I listened to one of her books and she paused at every scene break long enough for me to know when we were now shifting from one scene to the next in the story. No run on sentence reading from her. If I not had my Limbus Inc. digital book to read along with my audio I would spent a lot of time rewinding the audio and trying to make sense of what I just heard and then I would have blamed the author for his poor writing style, not knowing it was the narrator that had failed. My personal belief is this audio works best with the digital book so the listener can follow along best.