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** spoiler alert ** I don’t write reviews.

No, I did not like this. It was too much like Gilded Needles. Honestly that wasn’t to my tastes either. McDowell said he was a commercial writer and it shows. I guess sometimes he just wrote really amazing stories, like Cold Moon Over Babylon, The Elementals, Toplin and to a lesser extent, Blackwater.

The writing itself was fine. The storytelling was very much an expository affair. Many things happened, and the reader is mostly told, not shown. No real depth or interest in the characters. Plus the villains were illiterate and could not maneuver through life nor speak in complete sentences.

This book is dark, but not in a good way. It reminded me over and over how McDowell, in life, was obsessed with death. I don’t find necrophilia to be super healthy. (In this case I mean love of death, not love of screwing death). The violence was sickening and unnecessary, in my opinion. It didn’t add to the story in any way. I don’t enjoy feeding archetypes of evil.

Then there was the ridiculous stuff. A lady with a tiny pet lap dog that turned out to be rabid just because he needed to kill off a character. Or the helpless nature of adult characters in regards to annoying lying family members. Or the way everyone in Philo’s life is slaughtered. Even by chance as in the train wreck, which was amazingly perpetrated by the same evil family??! We get an epilogue where we find out her husband dies almost thirty years before she does. So we can feel nice knowing she gets more suffering after the story ends. Ew.