Reviewed by: JA Gill
Genre: Horror
Approximate word count: 40-45,000 words
Availability
Click
on a YES above to go to appropriate page in Amazon, Barnes & Noble, or
Smashwords store
Author:
Author
James Melzer lives in Pennsylvania. He is the author of several other novels, all available for your e-reader.
Description:
Rita
Clemens is leaving her post with the Philadelphia Police Department to start
life over in a small town. She thought she’s seen it all, but even in a town
where time slows down she discovers one secret as old as time itself.
Appraisal:
There’s at
least one Tumblr account and a few websites dedicated to collecting opening
passages from novels. I’m a fan of these gatherings of words, and with hours
spent sifting patterns emerge. “The sky above the port was the color of
television, turned to a dead channel.” “I was born twice: first as a baby girl,
on a remarkably smogless Detroit day in January of 1960; and then again, as a
teenage boy, in an emergency room near Petoskey Michigan, in August of 1974.”
“It was a pleasure to burn.” The opening sentences of a story are a summary, a
tease, a throat-clearing, a stage-setter, and a quick measure of the author’s
talent. So what to make of James Melzer’s latest work, Hull’s Landing, opening with an extended scene of a girl being gang
raped? This is horror fiction after all, where delicacy and subtly run the
other way, and Melzer wants to remind us incase we forgot.
The
significance of the opening passage is the objectification of unadulterated
evil—as if an Exhibit A tag would stick to its oily black surface—and a graphic
scene of prolonged suffering, one that continues relentlessly for the majority
of the book, is as unsettling a depiction as any. However, grand abstractions
beg for archetypes, or at least a structure of metaphors, as cantilever over
what might otherwise become a senseless plunge into depravity and gore. It is
clear that Melzer is aware of this. Unfortunately, he comes up short in the
telling. At Hull’s Landing divine reckoning has a habit of poofing onto the mise-en-scène in the form of a near literal
deus ex machina—all bright and
shiny—iterating a thoroughly unsatisfying Sunday school solution to the problem
of evil.
Once one
gets past the rickety plot and tired clichés, in James Melzer’s novella there
is never a dull (read nonviolent) moment or lack of quirky descriptions, such
as “he stopped cold, and the blood drained from his face like noodle water
going through a strainer over the sink.” And “…Rita just about fell off the
steps as it shook her on the inside like a rattlesnake in her belly.”
FYI:
Graphic
violence
Format/Typo Issues:
No
significant issues
Rating: ** Two stars
No comments:
Post a Comment