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Scent of Shadows by Vicki Pettersson
Feb. 6th, 2007 05:05 pmNote: This review was written from an ARC. The book will be out on the shelves at the end of February. Bits of this review may also appear on the Eos website or blog.
We open as Joanna Archer goes on a blind date with a man who turns out to be a monster, the real kind. This book, which plants a foot each in urban fantasy and horror, starts off sprinting there and doesn’t slow down for over a hundred pages as Joanna is drawn into the battle between good and evil going on behind Las Vegas’s glittering façade. It’s a universe with an unmistakable flavor of the comic book about it, from the superhero touches like power glyphs that glow on the chest to the bold, surprising leaps of the plot.
This book surprised me more than once, and for that alone I could like it. The plot moves at break-neck pace, and Pettersson is utterly unafraid of violence or death or real, painful consequences. And there’s a wide sampling of narrative styles here, with touches of romance, urban fantasy, dark horror, and most unexpectedly, comics. The supernatural struggle which sweeps up Joanna is retold in comics within the book, one series of manuals for each side. And that seems somehow exactly appropriate for this universe where death comes fast and unexpected, where powers are vast but carefully ordered, where science and the supernatural become inextricable. I enjoyed the unusual flavor of this book, though I think an actual comics fan will have a much easier time with the occasional dearth of real explanations – I still don’t know, after 400 pages, exactly what Joanna’s powers are and how they are limited. The dialogue will probably also fall much better on an ear other than mine; it sounded far too scripted and unnatural to me on a number of occasions.
And, stepping onto the soapbox for a moment, I do have to register my extreme personal irritation with – well, let me demonstrate. No wonder even a blind woman had felt compelled to speak to me of choices and control.” Two things which blind people have no authority to speak on, apparently. Casual dismissiveness of a secondary blind character like that pops up a handful of times in the book, and it had this particular blind reader grinding her teeth for pages.
Still, this book is fast, unexpected, gritty, and bold. It’s an impressive debut novel, and I’m excited to see what Pettersson does as she develops her skills. I’m not the perfect target reader for this book – it's much better suited to the many Heroes watchers out there than to my personal taste. But that’s just it; Scent of Shadows drew me in and kept me interested anyway, through a style which is definitely not my favorite. But as one character says, “The truth multiplied by the collective consciousness equals fact stranger than fiction,” and I’m always happy to read fiction as strange and imaginative as this.
We open as Joanna Archer goes on a blind date with a man who turns out to be a monster, the real kind. This book, which plants a foot each in urban fantasy and horror, starts off sprinting there and doesn’t slow down for over a hundred pages as Joanna is drawn into the battle between good and evil going on behind Las Vegas’s glittering façade. It’s a universe with an unmistakable flavor of the comic book about it, from the superhero touches like power glyphs that glow on the chest to the bold, surprising leaps of the plot.
This book surprised me more than once, and for that alone I could like it. The plot moves at break-neck pace, and Pettersson is utterly unafraid of violence or death or real, painful consequences. And there’s a wide sampling of narrative styles here, with touches of romance, urban fantasy, dark horror, and most unexpectedly, comics. The supernatural struggle which sweeps up Joanna is retold in comics within the book, one series of manuals for each side. And that seems somehow exactly appropriate for this universe where death comes fast and unexpected, where powers are vast but carefully ordered, where science and the supernatural become inextricable. I enjoyed the unusual flavor of this book, though I think an actual comics fan will have a much easier time with the occasional dearth of real explanations – I still don’t know, after 400 pages, exactly what Joanna’s powers are and how they are limited. The dialogue will probably also fall much better on an ear other than mine; it sounded far too scripted and unnatural to me on a number of occasions.
And, stepping onto the soapbox for a moment, I do have to register my extreme personal irritation with – well, let me demonstrate. No wonder even a blind woman had felt compelled to speak to me of choices and control.” Two things which blind people have no authority to speak on, apparently. Casual dismissiveness of a secondary blind character like that pops up a handful of times in the book, and it had this particular blind reader grinding her teeth for pages.
Still, this book is fast, unexpected, gritty, and bold. It’s an impressive debut novel, and I’m excited to see what Pettersson does as she develops her skills. I’m not the perfect target reader for this book – it's much better suited to the many Heroes watchers out there than to my personal taste. But that’s just it; Scent of Shadows drew me in and kept me interested anyway, through a style which is definitely not my favorite. But as one character says, “The truth multiplied by the collective consciousness equals fact stranger than fiction,” and I’m always happy to read fiction as strange and imaginative as this.
