Owl Goingback is another new name for me. He’s published by Cemetery dance which is a good sign and the plot sounded interesting. This book was supplied as a review copy a long while back and I really should have read it ages ago.
Robert and Janet Pattison are on holiday with their ten-year-old daughter Krissy in the depths of the Everglades. Over 100 years earlier, an escaped slave and voodoo magician Mansa du Paul set up a small town a short distance downriver. Thanks to his taste for eating the children from the local Seminole tribe, he was soon hunted down, killed and his bones scattered. But his spirit remains, haunting a nearby lagoon and whispering to those who can hear him.
Of course, Krissy is one of those people. She soon falls under his spell and the horror resumes. Can local medicine man help save the family and prevent the evil of Mansa du Paul from rising again from the depths?
It has the feel of the old trashy 80s horror novels with garish covers, and most of the same qualities. Goingback takes a story that might have felt like a hoary pile of clichéd nonsense, and gives us a hoary pile of clichéd nonsense.
The copy I read is chockful of typos, wrong word choices (“you’re” for “your” etc) and generally poor grammar. I thought this was because this was an ARC, but then I found out it’s a reprint and the book has been published at least twice before, originally in the year 2001. Suddenly all the errors don’t make quite so much sense.
I might have let them fly if the story and writing in general were better. But sadly, it’s not a good book even if you ignore the errors. The writing is extremely repetitive.
The characters are not well drawn. The style of writing is repetitive in the extreme. There are major continuity errors. Some examples- Jimmy, the medicine man, has been squatting in a shack downriver for at least 30 years. Krissy is not the first child to disappear from the camping huts the family has chosen for their vacation. We’re told that each time a child vanished, the police searched the area thoroughly. However, one of the local cops who’s been on the force for decades, has apparently never seen Jimmy’s shack, which is visible from a canoe ride down the river and only a 10-minute walk from the fishing camp. This is even more surprising since we find out that Jimmy has apparently been arrested every time a child disappeared as well…
In a chapter from Mansa’s point of view, Mansa muses that he hadn’t expected such a large response to his taking Krissy, and ruminates on how the Seminoles didn’t care much when their children were stolen… despite the fact that on the last occasion when he stole Seminole children, the tribe killed all his followers, tied him to a tree and killed him slowly before scattering his bones.
The distance to and from the lagoon seems to change from a half an hour canoe ride to a ten minute walk depending on what’s needed for the storyline.
Those are just a few of the more egregious errors in the narrative. As well as being extremely repetitive, the book is also filled with stock cliched characters who never rise above the stereotype.
Krissy is an exception here as she fails to reach the rank of stereotype ten-year-old. She feels like a five-year-old character rather than the ten-year-old she’s supposed to be.
The Indian witchdoctor and guardian of the lagoon should get a pass on the stereotype front, since the writer is Native American himself, but he still comes across as an unconvincing cartoon Indian that you might expect to find in an episode of Scooby Doo.
You may have realised I’ve used the phrase “Extremely repetitive” several times now. This is because the book is extremely repetitive and I’m simply trying to make you the readers of this blog experience how it feels to read this book without actually having to read it. There are times when he switches viewpoint and describes the previous scene in almost exactly the same phrasing.
Once the killings get underway, there are a couple of effective scenes. But then they repeat themselves from another viewpoint and any tension raised is lost in the eyerolls.
Overall this is a very poor effort. I spent a lot of this book wondering if it was a comedy and I was missing the joke. A real disappointment from a normally extremely reliable publisher. Mr Goingback will not be Goingback on my TBR pile for any of his other works.
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