Reviewed by: BigAl
Genre: Horror/Historical
Approximate word count: 65-70,000 words
Availability
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Author:
“Aaron
Polson currently lives in Lawrence, Kansas with his wife, two sons, and a
tattooed rabbit. To pay the bills, Aaron attempts to teach high school students
the difference between irony and coincidence while cultivating a healthy
relationship with the works of William Shakespeare.”
For more,
visit Polson’s website.
Description:
“After
months of silence from the H&P Lumber and Pulp logging camp, strange raving
madmen have wandered out of the woods. Henry Barlow hasn’t carried a gun since
his wife’s brutal murder, a memory he drowns nightly with bourbon and whiskey.
When reports of the strange goings on at the Lewis River camp reach H&P,
they send Barlow and a small band of armed mercenaries upriver to investigate.”
Appraisal:
Sometimes I
feel like the master of the bad analogy. I have another one for you here.
Imagine you’re driving on a narrow, winding, two-lane mountain road with very
little traffic. As you drive around curves in the road, you keep hitting
potholes, which force you to slow down. If you want to get to the destination
enough, you deal with it, but they’re still an irritant.
That’s how
I felt reading Loathsome, Dark and Deep.
The potholes in this case were copy-editing misses, each one minor, but coming
frequently enough to slow me down. And I do mean minor. Things like a missing
‘a’, ‘the’, or ‘of’. An occasional verb tense or homonym error. If you tend to
skim past those things, you won’t notice them here. If you’ve trained your
internal editor to pay attention, it will slow you down. On the plus side,
you’ll have more time to look at the scenery.
Despite
taking my reading off cruise control and paying too much attention to the road,
I liked the story. It takes place in what was then the Oregon Territory, and is
now Oregon and Washington State, in the 1800s. Although primarily a horror
story with a large dose of adventure in a historical setting, it has elements
of mystery and what I’ll describe as primitive steam punk. Although it doesn’t
have zombies, it comes darn close, for those who are into the living dead. As
you would expect, with this kind of genre mashing, it will also keep you
guessing.
Format/Typo Issues:
A large
number of minor copy-editing misses.
Rating: *** Three stars
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