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...the Soul of Wit - Short Reviews

Enjoy the new short reviews!

Along the River of Flesh (Gone to See the River Man #2) by Kristopher Triana

As a big fan of the phenomenal Gone to See the River Man, I was very positively surprised to see that there's a sequel, even though the first story, the way it unveiled and ended in soul shaking dismay, was perfect already. I am delighted to say that the second tome of unadulterated human depravity and extreme horror keeps up with the first book of what apparently/hopefully will become a longer series.

While River Man focuses solely on serial killer groupie Lori and the quest she needs to accomplish to get to her idol, brutal murderer Edmund Cox, the plot of River of Flesh is parted into numerous characters and points of views; police officer and textbook incel Keith Drakeson; privat eye Garry Chatmon who was hired by one of Cox' victim's family; June, yet another teenage fangirl of Cox; and finally, the beast himself – fugitive Edmund Cox on his way to River Man, to claim what he thinks he earned for the sacrifices he made for the mythic creature.

It was as if they'd entered another dimension, a hellscape of coral rock and broken trees where a claret river flowed like the blood of dead gods. What wasn't red was black – the encompassing gorge, the shadows of the thicket, the returning thunderclouds. The redness made grim adumbrations of the world they'd left behind, like the faint image of distant mountains on a smoky horizon. It contorted the features of the known universe into grotesque aberrations, as if the world had shattered and been glued back together, a model forged by a violent hand.

The stone cracked like thunder, every snapping slate having a different tone. They became musical but distorted, each new crack in the limestone producing another strum like the plucked strings of an electric guitar. The sound was sloppy and garbled, a bluesy dirge muddied by a heavy tone, like a guitar's output through a blown amplifier. A crazed, acoustic slide guitar underlined this black requiem, followed by a hushed percussion like chains being dragged across concrete.

Amazing atmospheric passages like the above describing the hellish parallel dimension the River Man inhabits will chill your spine, and so will Edmund Cox, who wanders around with body parts of his “darlings” in his pocket - I realized while reading this that I actually prefer the River Man to Cox, he scares me much less in that at least he has some kind of moral compass. I was happy to find something akin to black humor in this gloomy setting when we reach the end, and Kris once again surprises with a twisted revelation. And the best part? It looks like this series just might keep on going and going. The hope is there. 

Revelator by Daryl Gregory

Revelator goes back and forth between two timelines, 1933 and 1948, and follows the life of Stella Birch, who, as a nine-year-old, is left to live with her grandmother Motty in the backwoods of Tennessee. She discovers that her family have their very personal God living in a cave – they call him Ghostdaddy. The bright and quick-thinking girl she is, she contemplates critically, even after being declared her family's new “Revelator”, someone to commune with the God and forward his words to the elders of the local religious order, who will interpret those words.

After an incident she flees home and becomes a bootlegger in times of economic depression, but needs to return home for Motty's funeral, as well as check on the little girl named Sunny who was living with Motty before her death. So being back, will she finally be able to break the eternal fate of the Birch women and unveil Ghostdaddy's reality?

I'm not really one for Southern Gothic and historical novels, but both worked well in Gregory's Revelator, and accordingly, I progressively enjoyed the book, the less descriptive it became of time and place, and the more it started, almost science fictional, focusing on Ghostdaddy and its real nature. It was interesting and original to combine the entity Ghostdaddy with this setting.

My favorite aspect of the book was main character Stella, who asked all the right questions and whose critical mind I adored, her questions to the religious community of the village made me chuckle quite often.

A worthwhile read, as all of Gregory's writing is.

Mind of My Mind (Patternist #2) by Octavia E. Butler

The second book of Octavia Butler's phenomenal Patternist series was interestingly written before its prequel, so Butler probably was ahead of her time in doing that, luckily I can read them in the order they were intented to. 

We continue to follow Doro, the immortal shapeshifter who works on building an empire of people he genetically engineers, and who saves the baby Mary from his abusive mother, following his intuition this girl is going to make it big. He supports her all throughout her life, while she, as a Paternmaster, slowly helps loads of young people transform into their superhuman state.

At some point Mary becomes so powerful that it will be enough to challenge the one person who made her - an epic showdown ensues.

There wasn't too much happening here, just "days in the life of a superhero" except that there were many more women characters this time around, and they were fierce. Lots of reflection on being black and woman. Interested in how the series will continue.

Oracle (Robert Grim#2) by Thomas Olde Heuvelt

I now realize that without really meaning to I have been reading the second books of longer series this past month, and Thomas Olde Heuvelt's Oracle is the last of them. Honestly I wasn't really aware that Robert Grim is the detective who investigated the "Witch Case" from Heuvelt's previous book Hex, a book I quite liked, and because Grim was in charge of that case, he now is seen as some kind of expert on paranormal cases, and thus is called to the Netherlands when the thirteen year old Luca Wolf and his friend Emma discover an eighteenth-century sailing ship stranded in the middle of a tulip field, the Oracle. Emma entered the ship and disappeared and so did everyone else who wanted to help her.

An international team including Grim is tasked to solve the mystery, but as the case becomes ever more complicated through intrigues, government schemes, and the missing people returning in the shape of stinky Ocean Zombies, short interludes between chapters recount the history of the ship and the nature of its curse.

I did like this story, though not nearly as much as I did Hex. Still, I found it dragged a little bit in the middle and every time you think "OK, this can end now", there were new action and chase scenes. Still, a solid paranormal mystery that I read in preparation of Olde Heuvelt's author's event on March 31st at the Otherland!

The Eyes Are the Best Part by Monika Kim

Ji-won’s life falls apart: her father left her family for another woman, her mother is a mess, her sister hurt and all this affects her grades negatively.

It even gets worse when her mom starts a relationship with the utterly unlikable, annoying and invasive George, who starts staying with them when there's some construction issue in his apartment. Ji-won is having paranoid thoughts, visions and an irresistable wish to eat George's bright blue eyeballs. She develops an obsessive appetite for blue eyes in general, soon succumbs to it and starts acting on it.

I'm very disappointed by this, to say the least... I should have known by now that every time a book is tagged as "Adult horror" on Goodreads, if there is a need to specify that, it turns out to be Young Adult, and although I totally sympathize and can understand the main character's struggles, my expectations were different. I was in for something much more gory, ugly, something to scare and repulse me. What I got was the struggles and worries of a young girl growing up, which is valid, but not mine.

The bad ending gave it the final stroke.

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