Shay has always been able to see ghosts, ever since her father left their family when she was 6 years old. It had always been her secret that she kept hidden while she tried to lead a normal life
Until she found Hugh, a very attractive guy – who can see
ghosts as well. But seeing ghosts is just a tiny fragment of the truths he can
reveal about her nature, her heritage and her father
And the dangers they – and the world – face.
The world is fairly interesting. We have people,
Cryptids, with various abilities due to
their DNA being spliced with animal DNA (cats) leading to the ability to see ghosts and shapeshift and some
sundry other abilities which will no doubt arise. None of these abilities are
especially original or shiny but nor are they particularly clichéd. It’s
nothing exciting but it can work as a background – except the whole building
around it is mind numbing.
The way they came about these powers is original – which
is good because it’s absolutely freaking ludicrous. One’s ancestor drinking cat’s
blood is a ridiculous origin story. Hey, I would be Super Pork Man, empowered
by black pudding to be really tasty! This follows ongoing world building
shakiness is exacerbated by things like her dad making Shay, our protagonist,
super duper powerful by giving her his genes. He removed his ghost-seeing genes
and injected them into her giving her… uh… extra Cryptid genes I guess.
I kind of glaze out and try not to think about it too much or my head hurts.
A lot of the rest of the world building is just so
generic or, at least, horrendously underdeveloped to make it seem generic
because we don’t have any details to make it more than generic. For a large
part of the book the enemy is literally called “The Darkness.” Beyond making me
want to snark about reaching for torches, it’s so vague and pointless.
This is later developed into Native American mythology –
the Darkness is apparent Malsumis – a malevolent figure in Algonquian and Abenaki
beliefs. I can’t say I know much about either belief system on which to comment
except to say – Native American woo-woo and animalism! Brown people woo-woo
strikes again! And my admittedly limited googling points to these being people
being from the North-eastern US so the whole rural Texas reservation seems odd
(the reservation made up of a dozen people who don’t deal with any other Native
Americans seems odd too). This legend is pretty much the extent of delving into
any Native American culture (the tribe/nation isn’t even named) and I can’t esc
ape the feeling that it’s there for woo-woo justification. The flip side is we
are blessedly free from the more blatant stereotyping though poverty is very
much apparent.
As a villain in the book, Malsumis isn’t presented in a
particularly menacing or dangerous way. People talk about him as dangerous and
that’s about it – he wants to destroy the world and/or humanity. Ok, I can get
behind a malevolent deity that literally exists to cause nothing but
destruction – but I need that to be sold to me. A creature with literally no
motive in life except utter destruction of everything is not going to be very
human – they need to be inhuman to sell the whole mindset as believable. The Malsumis
presented is all too human – and not very menacing with James Bond monologues,
cursing out his minions and with the deadly, scary ability to turn to mist and
he ended up running away in the face of pretty unimpressive force. He needed
more oomph.
And why does he have minions? How do you even get followers when your remit is “the utter destruction of absolutely everything”? Does he offer a really good benefits package or something?
But the main reason why all of this falls flat is that there’s
little coherent plot that goes anywhere. There are plotettes.
