An omnibus is a volume containing several novels or items that were previously published separately. In the introduction to True Crime Stories You Won’t Believe: Omnibus Edition, author Romeo Vitelli justifies his choice of publishing the book as an omnibus by claiming that together his books form a more coherent whole. Each book is a collection of assorted true crime stories based on posts from Vitelli’s blog. If he means that together they form a more complete history of all crimes that have ever been committed, I suppose.
His writing reminds me of David Paulides’ Missing 411 series in which he chronicles missing person cases with strange circumstances and commonalities and seemingly supernatural elements. At the end of each case, he has a tendency to insert himself as the researcher, tying the case to similar cases, reiterating his confusions or amazement with the circumstances, or describing his frustrations with the authorities. It comes off as amateurish and repetitive. While Vitelli isn’t as egregious in self-referencing his research efforts, his writing still sounds amateurish. His style is inappropriately belittling and informal for the subject matter. Using phrases and words like “somehow” and “for some reason,” it’s like listening to a narrator who finds his own stories and the people in them ridiculous.
What attracted me to listen to True Crime Stories You Won’t Believe, however, was the narrator “Virtual Voice,” a computer-generated narrator for audiobooks as Audible explains. I’d never listened to narration produced by AI and was curious what it sounded like.
Well… with all the time they saved by having AI read a 17-hour-long audiobook, they could have at least listened to it and revised their prompts accordingly. Or maybe the producer of True Crime Stories You Won’t Believe did listen to it and, despite all the pronunciation inconsistencies and other signs of Virtual Voice lacking comprehension of the English language, decided to dump it on Audible anyway.
Here are a few highlights:
Virtual Voice pronounced EEG (electroencephalogram) as “eeeeeeg.”
A few stories included excerpts from song lyrics or poems. Virtual Voice ended each line with a verbal “slash” rather than a pause.
Vitelli snarkily wrote something like, “Why would he be there in the first place?” Virtual Voice read this as if “the first place” was an actual place rather than a phrase.
“etc. etc.” was pronounced as “Et See. Et See.”
One story featured a legend about wendigos. It also featured every possible pronunciation of “wendigo”: WENdigo, wenDIgo, WINdigo, etc.