That's one Hell of a tale....

A few notes before we start this. First, the book I'm covering today and the mythology that surrounds it is very adult in nature. As this blog is normally "G" rated, be warned that adult concepts may appear. Second, due to the nature of the mythos, I'm using Wikipedia for background, which will take up the first few paragraphs.

So, let's start back in the year 1986, when Clive Barker first published The Hellbound Heart, a novella concerning Frank cotton, and his unusual nihilism and taste for the very exotic in the boudoir. Frank opens The Lament Configuration, a puzzle box that also serves as an interdimensional doorway. Promising pleasures unheard of, Frank instead winds up guests of the Cenobites, sort of extradimensional sadomasochists. Frank, as we find out, wasn't expecting that.  Anyway, Frank's brother, Rory, and his lovely wife Julia move into the house where Frank opened the box. And Rory bleeds on the spot where the Cenobites grabbed Frank. Frank comes back, he and Julia rekindle their... um... extracurricular activities. A friend of Rory's, Kirsty, who loves him, witnesses Julia bringing men home (to help Frank rebuild himself through murder), and goes into to confront the hussy. Long story short, Frank kills Rory, Kirsty opens the box, makes a deal, and everyone winds up dead but Kirsty, who not only gets to meet The Engineer, but also gets custody of the box. She sees Frank and Julia's reflection in the box, and wonders if another box would take her to whatever paradise Rory wound up in. Anyway, a year later, Barker adapted the novella into a movie. Kirsty becomes Rory's daughter, and we become acquainted with this guy:

Yes, that was supposed to hurt.

whom in the book and the movie is never really named. He did, however, pick up the moniker Pinhead from the special effects guys, who had to spend 4 hours making Doug Bradley look like that for what amounted to about 10 minutes or so of screen time. The movie series continued for 9ish movies, but only the second one had Barker's involvement. Then again, after the fourth one, they tended to shoehorn Cenobites into preexisting scripts just to use the Hellraiser franchise name. Also of note, despite the names, the dimension of the Cenobites was never really named as an Abrahamic place of torment. Later, Barker returned to his Cenobites in Comic Book form, and that set of stories (which I'm summarizing via wiki, since I never read them), involves Ol' Pinhead leading a revolt in Hell after Kirsty kills off the original appearing Cenobites. Somehow, by the end, Kirsty becomes Pinhead. (There was a bit in the second movie where we find out about the human origins of the Cenobites.)

Whew.

Next up, we need to introduce Harry D'Amour.

Well, HELLO, Harry!

 

Harry first appeared in The Last Illusion (which evidently showed up first in Books of Blood, but I first ran across in a collection that also included Cabal, which was later turned into Nightbreed.) Harry is a paranormal Private Investigator, covered in protective sigil tattoos that let him know when trouble is coming. Harry shows up again at the end of The Great and Secret Show and becomes a major character in the follow up, Everville. (Harry evidently also becomes a Cenobite and leader of Hell's armies in the comic books.) 

Which finally brings us to Clive's new book, The Scarlet Gospels, which as you may have guessed, centers around Harry and Pinhead (or The Hell Priest, as he's generally referred to in the book. Pinhead is a derogatory nickname characters use to insult said Cenobite.) 

We open with a necromantic rite designed by the last Magicians of a secret order to raise Joseph Ragowski, former leader of said order, from the dead. Joseph isn't exactly happy about being woken up, and pretty much tells his raisers that it's kind of pointless, since a certain demon has pretty much killed off everyone in the order to get at the rarest magical tomes each hoarded away. We get graphic descriptions of how said demon dispatched folks, then ol' Hell Priest shows up in the flesh, so to speak. Let's see... all but one of the summoners dies, one after giving birth to Pinhead's baby. The survivor is to become HP's puppy. 

Cut to: Harry D'Amour is in New Orleans on a mission on behalf or Norma, a blind woman who sees and talks to dead folks. (Pretty sure Norma showed up briefly in Coldheart Canyon.) A dead gent who was quite the upstanding man in life had quite a secret life hidden away in New Orleans. Which means Harry's on payroll to go clean up his affairs post-mortem. Well, among some rather... um... explicit games the man had been playing with barely legal boys, Harry finds the Lament Configuration. Which does indeed open somewhat of its own accord, and Harry meets Hell Priest. Only there's no "I'll have what she's having" in this meeting. HP wants Harry to chronicle the undertaking he's working on, or else. HP uses large hooks on chains and his "puppy" to try to convince Harry to do so. HP doesn't really want to take "No" for an answer. Harry escapes, and winds up getting healed with a little help from Dale, who dreams the future. (Most of the healing comes from a Hoodoo woman, but she tries to kill Harry using a monster straight out of Dogma.) 

Anyway, Harry heads back to New York, which is about the time the book starts getting interesting. 

See, we get an idea of what HP is actually doing, as he is found in violation of his Order's rules of NO MAGIC. As such, he gets kicked out by the Cenobite's leader. So, like any good S/M demon, he uses his magic to kill off everyone else in the order. After doing so, HP and his "puppy" make a visit to New York, where they wind up kidnapping Norma, which winds up with Harry, Caz (Harry's tattoo artist), Dale (who dreamed of coming to NYC), and Lana (a stone cold woman who's probably buried in one of his other books) descending into Hell to rescue her.

What follows is a travelogue of Hell, as the Harrowers chase the Hell Priest on his quest to meet his maker. While the journey is fascinating, I can't go into great detail in here without spoiling some of the bigger surprises in the narrative. 

What I will say is that some of the plot threads reminded me of some of the bigger stories in Neil Gaiman's Sandman graphic novels, and as I stated above, there's a scene early on where I half expected Silent Bob to show up with air freshener. Also, I think he raided some of his own comic work from the Pinhead series for some of the plot. Which doesn't really matter, since the narrative as a whole holds together, despite retconning the original source material to a large degree. Not that pretty much everything that came after The Hellbound Heart didn't change things to suit their need as well. The Hell Priest's motivations are a bit shaky, and his turn towards chaos seems a bit oddly defined after an eternity of ordering the Damned, but honestly, it seems more a case of demons being bound to the rule that affects humanity: there are things Man (and Demons) aren't meant to know.

I will also say Barker writing, as usual, is filled with a visual flair, his words paint such pictures in the mind. It's been one of his gifts from the beginning. I also love some of the droll references that slip in, like the largest city in Hell being built on 8 hills, just to outdo Rome. While this won't replace Imajica as my all time favorite Clive Barker novel, it is probably one of the best things he's written in a long time.

Non-Smoking, please

I was a bit concerned when I picked up Kelly McCullough's sort of most recent Fallen Blade novel, Drawn Blades, mainly because it's book 5 in the series, and his other series, WebMage, ended after 5 novels.

Thankfully, as we find out after this one ends, there is indeed a 6th one that evidently got released this month.

None of which is helpful here, beyond letting readers know that Aral's adventures will continue.

Anyway.

We rejoin Aral in the city of Tien not long after the end of the last book;s tales of government restructuring. To that end, Aral is back again sitting at his favorite bar (although he's now sober) when a smokey ghost forms from the tavern fire, looking nothing so much like Siri, one of the other blades who's nickname was Mythkiller. Siri's avatar performs a pantomime ceremony of handfasting, leaving Aral with a rather interesting ring made of smoke on the 3rd finger of his left hand.

After an attack by a mythic beast and some assistance from Aral's librarian contact and his familiar, contact is made with Siri through smoke again, and the end result Faran and Aral are off to The Sylvani Empire. Which is an adventure in and of itself, since in quite possibly the most unique way of gaining travel speed, they wind up traveling by Dukoth as far south as the Wall. (Note here: The Dukoth are a race of First Ones who are more or less Elemental Earth. Aral's smoke ring gets their attention, and the need to speed Aral and Faran across the land.) Along the way, we learn more of the First Ones, races created by the gods prior to humans. Seems the First Ones rebelled again being slaves to the gods, and there was a war in Heaven. The gods won. As such, most of the First Ones live behind the Wall that separates the Empire from the human lands. Mind you, a few of the First Ones rose to a level near Godhood and were punished to be buried and never dying. One of the Buried Ones was dealt with by Siri before these novels began, thus her title of Mythkiller.

However, due to magical principles and a dead goddess, when we finally meet Siri in the flesh, we find out her smoky nature is due to her becoming part of the binding holding The Smoldering Flame in his burial. Namara, before she died, helped keep his influence over Siri in check, but after the Emperor of Heaven killed Namara, the binding weakened a bit, giving Siri and her Shade some smoke overlap.


Not longer after the touching reunion and consummation of wedding vows as part of the deeper magics, Kelos enters the picture, making for a Namara's disciples reunion from Hell. Kelos is working to find a key that will resurrect a god before the Son of Heaven finds it, and before one of the Buried Ones finds it and tries to use it.

There's much going on in this book, including filling in much of the metaphysics of the world. things like the true nature of the blades Namara gave her acolytes, the nature of the Son of Heaven and his end goals, and the rather fractured relationship between Kelos and Aral and Kelos and Siri.

I reserved the new one this evening, and I look forward to seeing where this goes next. McCullough may miss a few dangling plot threads (like the attack by the mythic beast that never really gets explained), but his world building is nothing less than spectacular.

Go ahead and make the scene all day, but tomorrow there'll be hell to pay

It took a while to warm up to Ofir Touché Gafla's The World of the End, but by the end, I was sort of in love with it.

We start by meeting Ben Mendelssohn, a fairly recently widowed man in Tel Aviv, who throws a party for his now deceased wife Marian on her birthday. The night ends with fireworks, after which his friends come back in to find Ben has shot himself in the head to be with Marian.

Ben becomes aware again in a white room being provided an orientation on how to deal with the afterlife along with a multitude of folks who died on the same day he did. This covers how to entertain one's self in the afterlife, what jobs are available, the lack of any kind of trade or commerce, the idea of Vie-deo (where one can watch one's life played back), and a general overview of how housing is assigned to souls. There's also an explanation of the fancy neck gadget one presses buttons on to make phone calls, sleep, etc. If one punches the 3 button 7 times, one also can sleep eternally.

What Ben does not find after exiting the orientation is his wife waiting on him. He does meet a wheelchair bound Belgian who tells him of his love, whom he (the Belgian) waits on every day as the doors open. The Belgian does give him contact information for the Mad Hop, one of the Other World's private investigators.

In the mean time, we get wrapped into life in the world of the living, where people tangentially related to Ben keep winding up in comas under the care of Ann, who spends most of her nursing career getting people to provide euthanasia to their spouse or loved one, with the goal of retiring after 100 deaths. Ann used to watch Ben working out in the window of a gym and fell in love.  Adam, a game programmer and celibate pedophile thinks she was staring at him and asks her out. Adam;s brother, Shafar, is an actor with his own connection to Miriam.

We also meet two very passionate people who love Salman Rushdie and meet in Tel Aviv for the first time. Problem being that Yonathan has a heart attack and goes into a coma before he can meet his lady love, Marian.

Ben's search for Marian in the Other world keeps getting nowhere, although we do meet his entire family and get a bizarre explanation of his family's death curse courtesy of the Aliases. (Aliases would be the souls of children never born. They, like the Charlatans (people who are in comas or between worlds), are among the only people who wear clothes in the Other World.

Eventually, this all gets wrapped up and we finally towards the end find out how all of these disparate plot lines tie together.

While the book was originally written in Hebrew, the copyright on the English translation is by the author himself. While this is good, since it better preserves the flow of the narrative and allows the word play to stay intact. On the down side, some of the idiomatic phrases don't translate well, making a few passages a bit rough to read. There's also the entire subtext of Rushdie, which largely flew over my head. (Honestly, I tried reading The Satanic Verses about 25 years ago and couldn't get into it. YMMV.)

But honestly, it was probably one of the better books I've read this year, and his vision of the afterlife is rife with some very interesting ideas and some very vivid mental pictures.

Return of the master

So, I finished Benedict Jacka's Hidden on the way into work today.

Much like Simon R. Green's work these days, there isn't much material here to really review without getting spoiler heavy, sadly. Which is bad, since this book delves deeper into themes about the differences between Dark Mages and Light Mages, and the grey area Alex operates in.

But basically, Ann, the life mage gets kidnapped early on after dropping out of the Light Apprentice program. This sucks in the usual cast to figure out where she is and why she was kidnapped.

When they finally get that far, it ends up being Alex on his own entering a Shadow Realm owned by Ann's former master, Sagash. Which also allows for the first current time appearance of Alex's former Dark master, Richard. Whom, it seems, has returned from where ever it was he vanished off to before the series started. Richard, who offers a deal that both Ann and Alex refuse.

However, we also learn of Ann's training under sagash and why it is she's such a pacifist.


It's a fun read and addition to the series, although much of it seems to exist mainly to beef up plot lines down the road.

That's a lot of cardio

I actually finished Robert Jackson Bennett's City of Stairs a few days ago, but I was on vacation and trying to type a review on a tablet didn't seem like the best idea ever.

There's a heck of a lot going on in here, and much of the setting details get dumped early on.

Basically, in this world, there is a continent that once upon a time enslaved the island nation of Saypur. However, a man known as the Kaj rose up and slew the gods of the continent, and the roles sort of reversed. Saypur now controls the continent and enforces strict rules about what people are and are not allowed to study under the Worldly Regulations. The theory being that the less the continentals are allowed to display of their now deceased gods, the less they'll attempt to subjugate Saypur again. The continent is still divided into districts based on the Gods that one built them, with Bulikov at the center of it all. Bulikov, once the Seat of the world, remains fairly backwards as compared to other districts. We hear of the Blink, when all the godly miracles  vanished, causing much of the continent to contract, and The Plague Years when plagues prevented by the divinities suddenly came roaring back.

As we start forth in this world, we get an idea of how this system works in a trial setting as a Continental merchant defends himself in court against charges of violating the Worldly Regulations by putting a symbol of one of the dead divinities on his door. His trial is interrupted with the news of the murder of Dr. Efrem Pangyui by persons unknown. Dr. Pangyui, of course, being a Saypuri historian with unfettered access to the histories of the divines and their miraculous objects.

Into this hornet's nest walks Shara and her secretary Sigrud. Shara is a descendant of the Kaj, and in service to the Saupuri Ministry of Foreign Affairs. Which is to say, she's a spy. Sigrud, on the other hand comes from a nation that has descended into piracy and lawlessness following the coup of their king.

Shara starts her investigation by getting back involved with an ex-schoolmate of hers, a Bulikovian City Father named Vohannes Votrov who's currently trying to modernize Bulikov, against the wishes of the Restorationists, who want everything back the way it was. Shara and vo have a bit of history together, given they were romantically involved in school, although his interest lay in his own gender for the most part. Vo also wants Saypur to stop oppressing the continent and to invest in it. What follows delves into the relationships between nations, the nature of the divinities, and one whole heck of a lot of fun as some miracles still work, what's left of the divine makes its presence known, and a beast with Hell for its stomach makes an appearance.

Ultimately, the author tips his hand a few chapters early with the solution to one of the major mysteries, but the big one at the center is well hidden until the very end. The cast is well drawn, and as motives become clear, it becomes amusing at how muddy the waters really are in this world.

Much of the book is written in present tense, which becomes less noticeable as the book picks up steam.

I think Goodreads lists at least one more in this series, which I'll have to find before too long. It's well worth picking up if you're into some grnd mystery hiding in a whodunit.

Up time, downtime, and in m'lady's chamber

So, given the last book in Kage Baker's The Company series was more or less an anthology that filled in narrative gaps from previous volumes, it was interesting picking up The Machine's Child and picking up from where The Graveyard Game as well as The Life of the World to Come left off. Which is to say Facilitator Joseph is regenerating his "Father", the enforcer Budu, last seen hacked to pieces by Victor in 1906 San Francisco; Mendoza is being dismantled somewhere in prehistory; and Alec, the third and final incarnation of Project Adonai, living with the other two incarnations living in his head. All three incarnations of course being Mendoza's lovers. (This would be Nicholas Harpool, last seen burning at the stake in The Garden of Iden, and Edward Bell-Fairfax, last seen being shot to death towards the end of Mendoza in Hollywood.)

There's a lot going on, including a few seemingly unrelated stories concerning a non-immortal cyborg back in 500,000 BCE dealing with office politics near The Silence in 2355 CE, as well as Facilitator Suleyman gathering Immortals near and revealing the facility Mendoza had been held captive in. He also marks a spot 2 years from The Silence towards the end, when all the operatives are given a special emblem of service.

But that's neither here nor there. Most of the book is focused on Alec learning to live in his head with the rather disparate personalities of his prior incarnations. His AI, The Captain. helps the three of them go back in time to save Mendoza from Operations Research, currently headed by Marco, one of the old Neanderthal enforcers. Using the same poison used on Budu, he does get what's left of Mendoza out, which leads into the parallel regenerations of Mendoza and Budu.

Budu is dealing with a slightly off kilter Joseph, who's obsessed with finding Mendoza and Alec. Which, given Alec can move through time, and after experimenting with Mendoza's chrome radiation, finding they can move past the point where she got sent back into prehistory....

There's a lot of time jumping going on. Joseph and Alec meet about 2/3 of the way through, leading to more than a few revelations.

We also have Alec chasing after his DNA so that The Captain can make him immortal as well, and Alec and Mendoza  going through time dropping off literal time bombs, set to go off when The Silence happens.

It's kind of jumbled in places, and the ending asks more questions than it really answers. But, after reading so much series fiction, it's kind of nice to find serial fiction, where everything is building off of everything that came before. Although no one as of yet has figured out about Homo sapiens umbratilis, nor has anyone found Literature Specialist Lewis, he's still being discussed, since they assume Dr. Zeus took him out. Which, well, sort of.

Anyway, I'll be returning to this sooner or later, since I'm really enjoying the series, and I'm really wondering how finished it was when the author died. 

Going to a dark place.

Benedict Jacka decided to expand quite a bit on Alex Verus's back story in Chosen. See, we knew from prior outings that Alex started out as an apprentice to the Dark Mage Richard Drake, but we enevr really heard much about it, beyond the occasional hint here and there.

We start with Alex living what passes for the normal life of a Divination Mage with his apprentice Luna, and two other apprentice mages looking for a mentor whom we met in the last book in service to a rakasha. (That would be Varian and Anne.)

Anne, who's a Life Mage, senses someone spying. After more than a bit of chase and spying, we find out 6 Adepts (basically one trick mages) are out to get Alex based on one's vendetta due to something Alex did in his past.

Given that there's a bunch of stuff Alex doesn't know about the situation, we cross into a subplot wherein Alex winds up in "Elsewhere", sort of an Astral/Umbral/Ethereal Plane. It's here where we meet Shireen again, one of the other three apprentices Alex studied under Richard with. Shireen ends up giving Alex a tour of Rachel's (now Deleo, another apprentice of Richard's. The fourth, Tobruk was killed by alex before the series began.) memories concerning the events in question. Namely, kidnapping the girl who's brother is now stalking Alex, convinced he killed her.

Ugh. It's well written stuff, but it goes much darker than this series has gone before. I mean, yeah, Dark mage carries its own connotations of evil and such, but it's really quite a bit like reading how Lucas SHOULD have handled Anakin's transition to Sith Lord.

Without going into graphic detail, dealing with themes on when murder is justified is not something I really expect out of these types of books. I mean, yeah, the series is kind of Magic noir, but....

Anyway, Yeah, kind of glad I came back to this series now.

Someone queue up the AC/DC!

So, I picked up a book recently that that I assumed was a bit like Snakes on a Plane, wherein one only needed the title to get an idea of the plot. 

Because, with a cover like this, what else could one expect?

Certainly not this....

Or this....

Anyway, gif soup over with, what I found reading Christopher Fowler's Hell Train was a narrative much better than the title or cover art would allow anyone to assume. 

We start in 1966 as an American screenwriter currently on the outs with Hollywood's horror factories with such luminaries of shlock as Jack Nichelson, Roger Corman, and Vincent Price, makes his was to the UK to try his best to get a job writing at Hammer Studios. Hammer, of course, would be the UK studio behind schlock starring such luminaries as Christopher Lee and Peter Cushing. Usually featuring Dracula, boobs, and blood. Shane, our writer friend talks a bit to Michael Carreras, the most senior production assistant he can find at Hammer. (This conversation also fills in the gaps on what was slowing killing Hammer Studios and their competition.) Michael gives Shane a week to write a script with the help of the busty Emma. 

What follows is almost a portmanteau as defined by the studio towards the beginning. In this definition, a portmanteau is a bit like, say, Creepshow, where several individual stories are told with one book ending story to tie them together. In this case, Shane's script writing brings us out of the narrative that is his script on a few occasions.

.The script, however, is the main thrust of the book. In true British horror fashion, we start off in small village Romania not long after the start of The Great War. Romania is about to start a civil war as Bulgaria and Transylvania are set to invade. Nicholas Castleford, a British ne'er-do well in Romania scamming money for the most part meets a nubile young virgin named Isabella at her father's Inn in Chelmsk. Since no more trains run out of Chelmsk for the evening, Nicholas is of course stuck. Isabella, of course, is betrothed to Josef, who works at the local foundry. Hearing rumors of both the armies coming to town that night, and rumors of a train running at midnight, Nicholas convinces Isabella to accompany him back to London via the mysterious midnight train. 

It takes a bit of doing, mainly since the locals as well as the armies attack around the time the train rolls in. But Nicholas and Isabella do wind up on the train, along with Thomas and Miranda, a married couple on holiday to celebrate Thomas's new assignment as a Vicar in a small town. The Conductor doesn't take money for tickets, merely choosing who's allowed on by those he thinks the train can win against. 

Because, yes, in a book called Hell Train, I'm pretty sure everyone can take a stab at what the name of the obscured last station is. The trick is that the train will challenge each living passenger with their own deepest flaw. If they lose, they get round trip tickets for life. If they win, well, no one's ever one, so why bother asking about that?

In between scenarios on the train, we get to meet the Hammer cast, all discussing what roles they'd like to play in the movie. For those of you who have seen a Hammer film, you'll probably already be picturing some of the stars in the suggested roles. 

It's a fun read, and the sacrifice that starts the games on the train is breathtaking in its use of setting to have fun with history. (Basically, the first death is a former Austrio-Hungarian chauffeur who had to fill in for the regular driver in Sarajevo when Archduke Ferdinand went visiting. However, when he got back to Vienna, the regular driver got all the blame for what happened.)

Like most Hammer films, neither the end of the script nor the very end of the book itself make a heck of a lot of sense. However, the path to get there is well worth the ride, filled with a rather fun homage to 60's horror films and the trade offs made to get stuff past the censors.

Fishing for corpses

Well, back when I posted about another book by Mark Richard Zubro, I mentioned that I had 3 books by him checked out. One ended up having no renewals left, but I figured out I'd read it a while back. The other, Hook, Line & Homicide, I figured out that I don't remember reading at all. And since it isn't due back for another week, I read it.

Paul Turner, his sons Brian and Jeff, his lover Ben,  his former lover Ian, and his detective partner Fenwick and family, all go on a fishing trip in rural Canada. (Also in tow is nonagenarian neighbor, Mrs. Talucci, who leaves by boat to parts unknown for the duration of the trip.)

Anyway, Paul and Fenwick end up meeting Scarth Krohn, the local town bully while out for dinner. Scarth at the time is busy harassing the local First Americans in the restaurant parking lot. After Paul and Fenwick break up the fight, they become targets of Scarth and company's bullying, including a break in at their houseboat back in the marina.

Two days later, Paul's wheelchair bound son Jeff fishes Scarth's corpse out of the lake next to the houseboat.

Ian, the intrepid investigative reporter, starts digging around for clues, after finding out that 6 similar suspicious drownings have occurred on the lake, and interest is up in town, since Scarth's very affluent father is demanding an investigation. The local police chief is exceptionally racist and homophobic, and the local Ontario Provincial Police detachment is reluctant to do much because of the chief trying to get them removed from town. Said chief "rounds up the usual suspects (Billing Morningsky, the First Nations kid being harrassed earlier; Ralph, a kid who spent his youth being harassed by Scarth; and even Ian, who's been asking questions around town) and warns Paul and Fenwick not to investigate.

Needless to say, this provides impetus for the dynamic duo to get involved on the side, which tends to make the town seem like a an isolated Lovecraftian village well versed at hiding secrets. Mind you, the secrets are more drug dealing and internet porn than ancient gods from outside time and space, but....

Anyway, by the end we find out exactly what happened, and we know why Scarth died and why Scarth's on again off again girlfriend was foud beaten to death not far from where Scarth's body probably entered the lake. As well as a lesson on why gay folks should take self defense.

Really, the part that both amazed and amused me came towards the end when things like DOMA, the marriage bans, and even Matthew Shepherd get discussed. The publication date on this one is 2007, so it's nice to note that much has changes in a relatively short amount of time. In many ways, it's a bit like reading the middle three books in Tales of the City, wherein what was current at the time of the writing isn't so much anymore. While the issues might remain, they're no longer quite as immediate or as strongly opposed as they were at the time.

I'm kind of wondering if, had either of Zubro's series gone on a few more years, would the main characters have gotten involved with murder at their gay weddings?

Sartre was wrong

So, I finished Andrew Pyper's newest one, The Damned, while running around taking care of a few things this afternoon. Now, the last time we visited with him, we heard a tale that used Milton's Paradise Lost as a jumping off point to the narrative. In this, we're again in a similar vein, only more along the lines of our dear friend Dante and his Inferno. 

To be fair, I liked Inferno more than Paradise Lost. Then again, I wasn't fond of Purgatorio, and downright hated Paradiso. As Sartre famously said, "Hell is other people." But, Hell is also more interesting to read about than Heaven.

We're not quite touring hell in The Damned, and our narrator, Danny Orchard, is missing a Virgil to guide him. Danny is an author; his book The After was a best selling non fiction book about his near death experience following the nearly simultaneous death of his sister Ashleigh. Difference being he came back with proof of his experience, a watch belonging to his mother, who had been buried wearing the watch.

Ashleigh was not a nice person in life, and death hasn't seemed to particularly improve her sociopathic tendencies. This is the nicest way to put it. Ashleigh's ghost still haunts Danny, trying to bring him to her.

See, the story we get early on is that on their 16th birthday, Ashleigh invited "friends" of hers to follow her to an abandoned house in Detroit (the family lives in the suburb of Royal Oaks). The friend stopped following her on their bikes around city limits. Danny gets a call, and goes to find his sister trapped in the basement of a burning house that collapses on top of him as he tries to save her. Ash dies, Danny sort of dies, has his NDE, in which he finds himself on an elevator with his [still living] father, who gives him his mother's watch. Which he still has when he wakes up alive. Danny is given to believe that the After (the good part anyway) is more or less reliving your greatest day.

Which, as time passes, Danny ends up writing The After, moving to Boston, and speaking at various groups for folks who have died and come back. In one of the meetings we sit in on with him, we meet a lady who went to Hell rather than Heaven. She ends up committing suicide a few pages later.

Danny meets Willa and her son Eddie. Willa had a NDE during a break in that killed her first husband. They wind up marrying, despite the looming specter of Ashleigh over the proceedings. Ashleigh shows up during a picnic, in which we find that Ashleigh can give Danny a heart attack, and Eddie can see her ghost. Danny dies, finds himself in Hell for a bit, then wakes up to find he needs a heart transplant. (It should be mentioned here that much like Danny's original Heaven, Hell is also in Detroit.) Danny's death has also given Ashleigh more ability to reach across the boundary, we find out. We also get some background on why Danny thinks his sister was the way she is. It seems they were born dead, strangled by the umbilical cord. The mother made a prayer, the doctor's eyes turned read, the babies came back. Ashleigh claims she saved Danny from the river of ice and the people grabbing at them on the other side.

After Willa drives her car into a river and Eddie claims he saw Ashleigh pull the steering wheel, Danny winds up going back to Detroit to see if he can solve Ashleigh's murder. Which in turn leads to him finding out exactly how disturbed his sister was/is, and leads to the last part of the book, wherein Danny dies again, and chases through Hell trying to solve the last bits of the puzzle.

Really, I liked this one a bit better than The Demonologist. The ending isn't nearly as confusing, although there are still a few things left unresolved by the last page. The plot does borrow heavily from Dante, although the concepts in Hell resemble Clive Barker more than Dante. (Dante tended to organize Hell by sins; Barker presented a much more personalized punishment. In this, people tend to wind up some place away from from where they were happy. For instance, a pedophile winds up trapped across the street from a carnival.) Also, the dead in Hell are a lot less likely to interact with each other, although they will attack new folks, who smell of life the Damned can't really remember that well. We're told Ashleigh is considered a Demon, since she is one that can roam Hell, instead of being trapped by circumstance. There are also monsters that attack people in Hell. This being Detroit, they appear as Tigers. Also, the concept of someone coming back from death weakening the barrier is brought up, although it mainly relates Ashleigh being able to influence more every time Danny returns. And of course the concept that people on one side of the line between happy and bad afterlife can influence the other side by acts of great will.

Really, it's a good read. Not quite as thought provoking as some of the blurbs on the cover would lead you to believe, but there are things left for the reader to contemplate as the novel ends.