January 1984.
Benjamin’s business is on the brink of collapse just weeks after a close friend has gone missing. Is there a connection between the two? Desperate, he turns to a powerful and secretive group for help. An unusual agreement is struck, sealed not only with ink but also with a promise of one’s soul.
Now Benjamin finds himself caught in a web of abductions, suicides, and brutal murders. There are forces at work beyond his comprehension. With the help of a private detective, will Benjamin uncover the dark and terrifying truth behind it all?
Dark bleatings, my soulful tribe! This is my first Shrader and I wish I could rave more about it (I did ultimately rank it 3/5 stars though).
Benjamin has been left high and dry by his business partner, who swanned off without a trace and though his boat was found, he wasn’t. Benjamin’s sister is also pissed off because she is married to the guy. Financial stress quickly piles on, but then the apparent answer to all of Benjamin’s problems turns up in the form of a phone call and a single promise.
I don’t have a slew of issues with this book or anything, but I do have one major one that unfortunately for me was constant. I had a really hard time believing the characters, particularly Benjamin, would make the decisions they make, or react they way to they do to certain things. Character believability is the most important thing to me when I read, so if something feels off it’s really noticeable and I tend to not be able to get over it.
When he receives the phone call that incites the action, he’s asked if he’d kill to make his problems go away, and almost immediately says yes, without so much as questioning it. This just felt so bizarre to me because any normal person would react at least perplexed to such a demand, and most certainly wouldn’t agree. I feel that if we’d started the story a bit further in and Benjamin had already lost everything, tried everything to solve the problem, and perhaps needed to pay for life-saving medical treatment for his daughter or something, I could have accepted it, but he’s just worried about business at this point.
I’m not going to proceed to list more examples as the last thing I ever want to do, believe it or not, is criticise a book, but this type of head-scratching behaviour was a regular occurrence that made the characters impossible to relate to for me. The author has a great imagination so I think that if he’d slowed down a bit and focused more on character it might have felt a bit more natural as the plot moved along.
Right, now that the horrible part that always makes me cringe is out of the way, I can get to the stuff I liked! This is the part of any review that I much prefer.
So, as I said, great imagination. Also, we have Satanic covens, dark supernatural shenanigans, deaths up the wazoo, and stakes that keep climbing rapidly higher. I often read books where that feeling of peril wears off after a while because it feels like the author doesn’t want to sacrifice anyone, but you won’t find that issue here. Shrader is not precious with his characters, and if someone needs to go because it suits the story, then you better believe Captain Insano shows no mercy.
(Does anyone get that reference or am I an actual dinosaur?)
If you’d like to check out the book or the author, I’ve popped some links below for you:
Bleeeeat!
Happy Goat Horror 
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