All right, corvids! Behold! Our first book peck.
Got my hands on this self-publish for ARC reading, which made me a very lucky crow. It’s part of Thacher E. Cleveland’s Winston & Churchill Case Files. At 161 pages, it’s a shorter read, but this novelette puts those pages to use to pack a punch. Many punches. And punchlines!
Now, I came at this book new to the series, having not read the others yet. So all I knew coming onto the scene of the first chapter is that Martin is a bit of an awkward duck at a house party. The party gets immediately weird when he catches a whiff of a burning stench and descends into the unoccupied basement to track it down. Cue end of anything normal for the rest of the book, because he meets one sick looking entity that brings the creep into the story in spades.
Not that anyone else can see this hellish entity but him, because Martin is special. (Not fortunate—but gifted all the same.)
This of course cues Martin calling in his magic mentor, Henry Churchill, who we realize is the one with the true chops for handling this sort of thing. The two discover that not only has this thing been around quite some time, but it’s no small-fry. They have to track down the only two people who survived an encounter with the evil prior, and hope they can stop it before it’s too late.
The survivors are, let’s just say, less than thrilled.
So, I’m a big fan of creep and humor together. I love action movies with the quotable catchphrases and one-liners. The book manages to have both: dire, hellish scenes, monstrous baddies, and spine-cringing atrocities, and quick, bright flashes of gallows humor and witty, snort-worthy dialogue. The metaphors are comedic, making what could have been a heavy handed short horror novel a swift and entertaining read. While some books can botch the blend of terror and horrific imagery with attempts at humor, it works spectacularly well here.
But as we all know, every book wins us over by the characters and how they’re presented, and I love a blend of mid-ground intentions and anti-heroes. No one here is strictly a good guy. There are no white knights with spotless personalities here. These are people. They’ve been through flocked up things that fudged them up and they’re trying to stumble on with life despite, all in the name of hoping terrible things don’t happen to them or anyone else again.
There is also a revisited theme throughout: At what point can one justify the means for an end? Power is never free, and power placed over others is especially heinous, giving a parallel of thick gray lines between evil and those seeking to stop evil. There are secrets here. There is withheld knowledge. There is coercion, isolation, and guilt, and it makes this delicious tangle in what could have been a very simple “magic detectives hunting demons” sort of story. There are loose ends that tie up well, and there are nooses left looming for when Henry Churchill and his team come back again to handle the things that go bump in the night.
Now for nuts and bolts! Overall grammar is good and prose is fine. Action scenes are a challenge for me, so always happy to see when they’re satisfying and well done. Biggest things my inner editor noticed were some sentences that could have used some tightening, but nowhere near enough to remove my enjoyment for the novel. The dialogue, metaphors, and action made this a tasty read.
So, big goblin lick of approval! Enjoy!
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