Ressurection

My guess leans more toward “young” than “English as a second language” here. Neither “cut-throat” nor “cutthroat” are misspellings according to my browser’s auto-spell plugin (plug-in?), and if you’ve never heard anyone say “It’s been…” in an informal conversation, you must be living in a rather elite enclave of high society. People talk that way all the time in the rural backwater where I live.

As I say, the grammar’s awkward, not inaccurate; “clunky” is another fitting description. I mentioned two examples of what was wrong with the synopsis; I could have written a whole thesis. As my English professor at the community college would say, the language is too abstract, the voice is overly passive, and the constructions are choppy.

To give just one example of each problem, “It’s been past one year” is too abstract. “Above the cut-throat rush of his guilt to overwhelm him and the constant struggle for his identity” (aside from the gripe concerning using “cut-throat” vs. “cutthroat”) is far too passively voiced. “To top the madness that becomes his life, Ty, Jerry’s one true love suffers an auto crash after which her body goes missing” is extremely choppy.

That “It’s been past one year” sentence, in particular, is what convinces me the author is young and inexperienced rather than foreign. In English class, using such a sentence in certain exercises might actually earn the writer some credit from the teacher for being so concise; hey, substituting “past” for “more than” shortened that sentence by one whole word! Writing to meet the academic parameters of an English test rather than the practical demands of one’s target audience is a very common amateur’s mistake.

To get “back OT” as you put it, the misspelled cover (my browser’s spellchecker is flagging your use of the word “misspelt” for being misspelled) is probably another amateur’s mistake which I’ve been seeing a lot lately in authors from every generation born after mine: over-reliance on the spellchecker. Had this author written “Ressurection” into a word processor (or as a post on this site), the program would have flagged his (her?) error immediately; and if the auto-correct function was enabled, probably fixed it immediately as well. A picture editing program with a text insertion function, however, might not have such a spellchecker; whatever program this author was using probably didn’t.

Of course, far from excusing the author’s error, this oversight just serves to demonstrate that even if you’re entirely self-published, you should always allow at least one total stranger who’s reasonably proficient at grammar and spelling to proofread your work before you publish it for a whole bunch of total strangers (such as… us) to critique.