How it works: We each suggest two books, then one is chosen at random. This most book was suggested by Kaylee's wife, Ivy..
A God in the Shed by J-F. Dubeau (2017)
Book One of a trilogy. The second book, Song of the Sandman, was published in 2020, while the third was scheduled to appear in 2025 but was held back, evidently for "editing."
In brief: The small Canadian town of Saint-Ferdinand has been the scene of multiple murders and disappearances for the last eighteen years. Police inspector Stephen Crowley thought that would all be put behind him when he apprehended the serial killer, who confessed. Unexpectedly, the town's horror had just begun...
We go back to 1873 when the "small village of Saint-Ferdinand was little more than a crossroads encircled by a handful of farms and orchards. All told, a little over a hundred individuals inhabited the region." One of those individuals was twelve-year-old Nathan Joseph Cicero, who was to be sent to boarding school in the fall and wanted to enjoy his one last summer in the woods surrounding the village. Cicero is joined by three of his friends and they spend their days exploring the parts of the first that were unknown to local hunters and trappers. They came across a strange clearing that had absolutely no animals. In the clearing there was a dark hole in the limestone, framed by a tall oak tree. Other than the tree, there was no vegetation. No animals, no plant life, just silence. But there was something in that dark hole...a pair of strange eyes. Then a creature emerged. Small, humanlike but not human, naked but neither male nor female. Then it spoke to them. It has evidently never met people before and was eager to make friends. The four boys spent much of the summer playing with the creature (never named)...tag, hide and seek, and all the other games that young boys were prone to. They did not seem to be too upset when they saw the walls of the cave where the creature lives were decorated wit the bones and viscera of animals. (No wonder there were no animals in the area.) The creature believed firmly in the rules of the various games. It got upset when one of the boys bent the rules. It eventually attacked one of the boys for breaking the rules...
We shift back to the present day (although the year is not mentioned) and Sam Finnegan, an old man who lived in a run-down trailer hidden in the woods, has confessed to being the serial killer. Surrounding his trailer are nearly two dozen old refrigerators and in each is the body of a person who had gone missing from Saint-Ferinand, horribly brutalized and dissected, all with their eyes missing. their eyes had been placed on sticks, and all of the sticks were facing the cave. One refrigerator, however, had a body that had not been desecrated: the body of eight-year-old Audrey Bergeron, a child who had been well-love by everyone on Saint-Ferdinand; she had always been in poor health and her heart seems to have gone out, perhaps before or perhaps after she was place in the refrigerator.
The town is in morning. Audrey is buried. On her grave, her parents place her favorite teddy bear. Later that night, the local medical examiner secretly uncovers the grave, pounds iron nails into Audrey's feet, then pounds large iron spikes into her eye sockets. He places the teddy bear inside the coffin and reburies Audrey.
The single mother of Penny, a sixteen-year-old girl, is waylaid and butchered one her way home from work. Penny's best friend is Venus fifteen-years-old and a bit of an outcast because her parents are considered "hippies" in the conservative community. During the long period of the serial killings, Venus was the only "free-range" child in the village. Penny goes to live with Venus and her parents while th authorities try to determine what to do with her. In a corner of the shed in the back of Venus's property is a nest with fledgling birds; Venus sets up a remote camera to capture their activity. What she also captures is the creature, violent and hateful to all life and all mankind. The creature now considers itself a "god of hate and death," and has many powers, bit it can only move when it is not observed, as if it is following a child's game of Statue. The creature pleads to be set free, but Venus is afraid to do so, knowing that she or her family will be harmed.
The creature can influence animals, though, and when they come close he kills them and decorates the walls of the shed with their body parts. Venus wishes that some teenage bullies would stop harassing her, and one of them is horrifically murdered. More people are killed and long-held town secrets begin to be revealed. Cicero, now incredibly old, returns to town with a circus he has formed; a performer in the circus is a fortune-teller who also has old ties to the town and is able to predict the deaths of all the characters, except Venus. The is a former farmer who is now an artist who paints picture so real they literally come alive. The medical examiner finds himself jailed for to murder and gets free (of sorts) by mind melding with Penny. And Inspector Crowley is slowly going mad and begins killing people. And all long we are told the creature cannot be killed and is promising destruction to the town (and possibly the world).
So there's a lot to unpack here and the author seems to be throwing everything he can into the mix, often without explanation or logic. Time has not been taken to flesh out some of the important side characters, to the book's detriment. I hope that much that has been unsaid or is confusing will be made clear in the second volume, but, even so, they could have been handled much better here.
What we have is a book with many flaws, but with a narrative drive that pulls us (sometimes unwillingly) along. The novel was published by Inkshares, which touts itself as a "reader-driven publisher" whose "books are selected not by a group of editors, but by readers worldwide." I just wish they has spent more time with a group of editors, then the book may not have been merely readable, but outstanding.
The February selection of Erin's Family Book club is The Fear Index, a "financial thriller by Robert Harris, selected by Amy's boyfriend Gavyn.
No comments:
Post a Comment