I read one of Jonathan Janz’s books last year and liked it so much I bought a few more. This is the first of those few more that I’ve got around to. My TBR is in 4 figures and still growing. I really need a spare 957 years or so with nothing to do but sit around and read.
When Joe Crawford stops a young woman from slapping her toddler son in a petrol station forecourt, he has no idea what a chain of events he’s just sparked off. It starts with the mother (and her mother) attacking him, moves on to the mother immolating herself a few chapters later, and from then on, things get intense and violent.
It turns out the family are part of a fire worshipping sect and they have plans for Joe and his family.
This is a fun romp. The last book of his I read was the Dismembered, which was written in a faux gothic style. This is set modern day and is written in a much more modern style. It starts off dramatically and builds to an incredibly violent final act.
There are some implausible elements that took me out of the story a little bit- for example, the amount of personal information Joe’s cop friend tells him is surely enough to get him dropped from the force. Also, Joe turns from a believable builder/contractor looking for work into an unkillable fighting machine for the final section. The levels of damage he seems able to take whilst still wiping out cult members with whatever comes to hand feels somewhat beyond the normal boundaries of survivability.
That’s just me taking the finale a bit too seriously though and it has to be said that Janz creates some powerfully tense scenes amidst the mayhem. Other than the “how is he not dead yet” element (arguably a key part of the action horror genre in any case), the blood soaked finale is a great piece of action writing. It's cinematic in scale and you can almost see the blood spatter coming off the page.
The twists and turns of the plot are well handled. The characters are well enough developed that this reader at least felt for the good guys and hated the bad guys appropriately. The relationship between Joe and his wife feels real, with its humour and occasional clashes. The villains are given just enough complexity to keep them from feeling stereotypical.
Overall, this is a damned fine piece of writing and I will certainly be reading another Janz novel at some point in the near future. I'm very impressed at the way he can write effectively in two quite different styles. That's a real talent.
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