If you like your Urban Fantasy far more on the Urban Noir side than the Fantasy, a less than clear black/white dichotomy in your moralities, and some really sparkling writing, then you totally won't go wrong with this one. Putting book 2 immediately on my queue at the library.
My (lazy!) review of this consists of: Go read Bookaneer's review. Because it says everything I would say about this book.
Also, it's really really good.
So a little while back I did a Q&A with Mike Carey about "The Girl with all the Gifts" and he also agreed to do another one about the Felix Castor series. I wanted to make this one a bit different, so before I start nagging him about it, I wanted to ask fans of the books if they would like to submit a Question. If you are a fan and there's anything you would like to know...
DO shout! It will be a mix of Q's about the book and random things about the writer so if you've got a burning Question send it my way!
SHOUT AT ME! :)
Happy Reading BookLikers!
In the Felix Castor books, the gritty, jaded irony of the best of noir/hardboiled meets the precarious uncertainty of a fantastically imaginative apocalyptic world. Carey's prose is vivid, compelling, and compulsively readable, and Fix Castor manages to be sympathetic despite his many flaws. The Castor books portray a self-destructive protagonist submerged by his guilt, isolation, and loneliness, struggling to stay afloat in an uneasy sea of moral greys. Carey has a gift for interweaving human conflict and supernatural elements into a seamless whole. In every book, up to this point, the root of the conflict has been man's inhumanity to man. Each book has started with an apparently trivial case which leads Castor deeper and deeper into a poisonous web of conspiracy amongst privileged and powerful. All of the conflicts, in the end, come down to human sins and human actions. In Fix's world, humans are the root of all evil.
Until now.
Throughout the series, Fix has been tormented by guilt over his involvement in the fate of Rafi, his old college friend. Several years before, Castor, desperate to rescue Rafi from a botched demon summoning, accidentally bound his friend's soul to the demon Asmodeus. Since that time, Rafi has been half-mad, locked away to prevent the demon who possesses him from wreaking havoc upon the world. In The Naming of Beasts, Asmodeus puts his own plans into action and the plot that has been simmering for the last four books finally explodes into the forefront. For me, this meant that the driving force of the series--the tragedy of human inhumanity--was strangely absent from The Naming of Beasts. Most of the conflict comes from the machinations of the demon Asmodeus, and while Jenna-Jane Mullbridge, the other main antagonist/schemer, is technically human, she is essentially a straightforward symbol of the Evils of Science. While the plot is action-filled and fast-paced, it doesn't really have the corkscrew-twisty whodunit element that I found so compelling in the earlier books.
It also has so many plotholes that I could use it for straining pasta.
I'm really OCD about mysteries, and when a book doesn't work for me, I have a tendency towards evisceration-style reviews. So if it comes off that way, please note that I really do like the Castor books. It's just...well...here's my list of plotholes:
First of all, I thought the opening, with Fix and his random bout of alcoholism, was clumsy, awkward, and bizarrely devoid of emotion. Personally, I found it insulting, especially since the entire scene has essentially no impact on the rest of the plot. It's apparently just a tiny added bit of melodrama, and I find it vastly irritating to use addiction as a little temporary superficial decoration.
One of the biggest problems for me was the demon power issue. Books #2 and #4 make it pretty clear that a loose demon--any loose demon--can do a tremendous amount of damage. We've seen that even a small amount of demon essence can drive whole communities into savage fury or suicidal frenzy. So why did Asmo limit himself to running around and tearing a few people apart? Why didn't we see Asmo putting the works on massive groups of people? According to Fix, the reason for the random murders was to tip Rafi over the edge. Clearly if that was the goal, the more random violence, the better. It is therefore improbable to me that Asmo would restrain himself to those few deaths. The same is true for Fix's narrow escapes; given that we've seen how loosed demons can affect people at a distance, why not force Castor to kill himself, or at least freeze, during their first struggle? From a plot perspective, I understand why Asmo was limited to physical violence; until this book, Castor hasn't "powered up," so for the plot to work, Asmo had to be quite low-powered--ridiculously so, from the point of view of #2 and #4.
Continuing with my gripes about human evil, I was frustrated that one of the most fascinating aspects--the origin of demons--was essentially dropped in this one. While the plot would have created an interesting opportunity to explore Asmo's lost humanity, he is reduced to a two-dimensional sketch of evil incarnate. Even Juliet's previous humanity is ignored, and her previous incarnations, her slow transformation from angular, savage creature to the softer Juliet, almost seem to contradict her human origins.
As a mystery reader, I was also frustrated by the dropped plot threads/ red herrings. For example, how, precisely, did Linda fit in? Asmo claimed she did...what did he mean? Who was the "he" who Rosie warned Fix about? Surely not Gil, not with that oh-so-suggestive pause and change of subject. And why did Asmo hide in the tunnels? Why did he traipse around the city in a suggestive pattern? Why pick those particular people to kill? As I've noted, the reason given--to weaken Rafi--seems awfully tenuous, because surely killing Fix--or random passerbys--would have helped as well. Asmo has always struck me as an intensely practical guy. Surely there are plenty of other succubi in Hell; why not call up one of those to free him, then come back and wreak havoc on humanity? Why spend so much effort and take so many risks in the pursuit of Juliet? And come to think of it, why keep Fix alive? Why was he "needed"? That particular rationale for Asmo's actions seemed awfully weak to me. Come to think of it, how did Asmo make it out of England? Was that ever clarified? I'd also like to honour Castor with the Darwin Award for going into Asmo's tunnel unaided and unprepared instead of saving all the exorcists at the pool. Jeez.
Even Fix's whole "recording" thing bothered me: it's a game-changer, because it means that Fix's power to banish demons is not directly related to "self"; it can somehow be amplified by someone else's tech, recorded, modified, and more. So what does that mean for the future? Can others record Fix and use the recordings without his presence? If so, what, precisely, contains the magic? On the same note, the whole photo thing didn't work much for me either. What, would plastering arbitrary pixels work, given that they *could* be reconstructed to a face? Basically any set of pixels--any set of varied colours--can meet that description. Talk to any found-objects artist. If not, is it the intention, the belief, that matters? The meaning to the creator? If so, then who needed to embue the weapon with meaning? Rafi wouldn't have known what they were doing... was it exorcist power? It all just seemed awfully sloppy to me.
Part of my issue was that I was utterly unable to sympathize with most of the characters and their troubles. Fix's desperate mission throughout the plot--to disentangle Asmo and Rafi while keeping Rafi alive--struck absolutely no sympathetic chord in me. I've always considered Rafi an arrogant, weak-willed, selfish sociopath, a user of others who deserves to reap precisely what he has sowed. Personally, I've thought all along that Rafi deserves to die for what he has done and the tragedy he has brought into so many other lives. Much of my feelings are carried over to Pen, Rafi's whining girlfriend and Fix's unrequited love interest. Pen is always ready to blame everyone else for Rafi's actions, to place the consequences of Rafi's choices on everyone else's shoulders, to sacrifice anyone else for her precious lover's comfort. The demon-haunted Rafi is, in short, the perfect abuser and Pen the ideal enabler, both always willing to heap guilt and inconvenience and danger on everyone else to get what they want.
I think it comes down to a moral quandry of endless fascination to philosophers.[1] I don't tend to have much difficulty with these sorts of ethical questions. My viewpoint: find the most culpable person and let 'em have it. One reason why I'm endlessly captivated by hardboiled/noir is that this perspective almost unerringly places me (at least in principle) on the antagonists' side. In Castor's case, I was incredulous at Castor's unquestioning decision to thwart those planning to kill Rafi/Asmodeus. He is willing to sacrifice any principle, to encounter any danger, to risk all--including countless other lives put at risk by a demon on the loose-- to save his friend. I just kept wondering why he bothered. Even his more generally philanthropic actions are phrased as guilt over Rafi's predicament:
"If you save some bunch of people you don't really know and don't really care about, is that going to make you feel any better about letting Asmodeus get free and kill somebody you did care about? Because that's what this is about, isn't it? The redemption train. You're standing on the footplate and sounding the whistle, Castor."
Personally, I thought the HEA ending was an utter cop-out, especially with the convenient little tidbit about Rafi remembering nothing about the atrocities he committed. It may just be my disappointment talking. Given the events of the previous books, I fully expected the irony of Fix managing to save Rafi, only for him to die during the dissolution of souls. The bittersweet ending I craved was Rafi having the opportunity for freedom from a vengeful Asmodeus, but for once, taking a selfless decision, destroying himself and Asmodeus, and thereby finding some sort of redemption. Instead, we get this flat, contrived bit of superficial cheer. So Rafi and Pen get to dance into the sunset, consequence-free, leaving a sea of bodies behind them? Bully for them.
Science fiction and fantasy provide wonderful opportunities to twist reality just enough to put readers into a situation where their prejudices and preconceptions no longer apply and they can re-confront the basis for their beliefs. I think that's what Carey was trying to do with Juliet: we all know abusive men are terrible, but what if the abuser is a woman? What if the abuser isn't even human? What if she's the prototypical demon lover? What then? For me, however, it's still a black-and-white issue of domestic abuse, so Juliet's foray into sofa-throwing put a real dent in my sympathy for her as a character. While I was disgusted by Juliet the abuser, her attempts to define and quantify love and relationships were illuminating:
"Where does faithful come into the equation? It's just a word you use to hobble someone you love. To tie them to you. It's a weapon the weak use against the strong."
Carey does his best to paint her as a sympathetic character bewildered by her own loss of control, yet resigned to the darkness in her nature:
"There are limits to how far you can change yourself. I've come to the end of an arc, Castor, and I'm swinging back."
There were still plenty of aspects of the story that I loved. Much of the plot centres around the importance of names, and I always find that idea fascinating. Castor continues to struggle with the changes in his world and his own role in it. At one point, he attempts to explain his perspective:
"It's just a matter of time," I said. "Living versus dead? Sooner or later, we all defect to the other side."
Rosie, the elderly but still bawdy ghost, makes another enjoyable appearance, and at several points, Castor descends into Cockney rhyming slang, which warmed the cockles of my little Amurrrican heart. Despite my general distaste for woo-woo-evils-of-science-style plots, I was captivated by the vivid, gut-wrenching descriptions of Jenna-Jane's laboratory, where the dead men truly and terrifyingly "lose their bones." The climax, too, is positively pulse-racing; towards the end, I found myself hyperventilating (in traditional Castor style, come to think of it), with my hand convulsively clutching my jaw. Carey also manages to insert a few truly brilliant quotes into the story; for example:
"People only want as much history as they can easily carry around."
This might be the way the world ends, and I may have been sneaking Eliot quotes into every Castor review I've written, but I'm going to resist temptation, no matter how depressingly apt one particular quote may be.[2] To me, it felt as though the book had drifted away from the soul of the series: the strident cry against man's inhumanity to man, the acute, unblinking stare into human atrocity, the depiction of human folly and weakness--all have all been replaced by the simple, straightforward, distant evil of a coldblooded demon. There were plenty of bright moments and characteristic Carey wit, but I'm still sad that this beautiful chiaroscuro ends with such a feeble whimper. While I'm not thrilled with this ending to the tale, I have loved every other minute of Castor's powerful, imaginative, gripping series. If you're in the mood for gorgeously gritty noir, please give the series a try--the first book is The Devil You Know.
[1] The basic setup: an unstoppable train is rocketing towards a fork in the track. It's headed towards the left, where several builders are at work and will surely die if the train comes their way. You have the power to switch the train to the other track, but there's someone on that side as well. How many people need to be on the left side before you're willing to cause the death of the person on the right?
[2]I also thought about titling my review "A False Note," but it's just not fair on the series to end on a bad pun.
~~Other links~~
My commentary while reading The Naming of Beasts.
My review of The Devil You Know (Felix Castor #1)
My review of Vicious Circle (Felix Castor #2)
~~Other links~~
My review of The Devil You Know (Felix Castor #1)
My review of Vicious Circle (Felix Castor #2)
My review of Dead Men's Boots (Felix Castor #3)
My review of Thicker than Water (Felix Castor #4)
My review of The Naming of Beasts (Felix Castor #5)
[01/10/14]
[Chapter 2] I found this so problematic that after reading it, I put the book down for a week. Fix essentially goes on a hella massive bender and then just...stops. Cold turkey. No issues. Just moves on with life. To me, it feels utterly emotionless and superficial, and I really don't think the awkward commentary at all captures the struggles of addiction and alcoholism. Personally, I think this chapter is an insult to anyone who has ever dealt with addiction or encountered someone who struggled with an addiction. I'm going to pretend this chapter didn't happen, because--yet another issue with it--it appears utterly superficial and inconsequential to the story.
[01/14/14]
"Sorry, love," I said, slowing involuntarily. "I'm boracic." (L746)
Wow. It's been a while since I had absolutely no idea what a bit of British slang meant, but this one's new for me. DUDE. It's COCKNEY RHYMING SLANG. I HAD NO IDEA ANYONE ACTUALLY USED COCKNEY RHYMING SLANG. HOW COOL IS THAT?
"I'm telling you this as a friend," he said when I sat down opposite him. "Which means, if you tell anyone else and if it comes back on me, I'll kick you face down into a ditch and stand on the back of your head until you stop moving."
"As a friend," I clarified.
"Exactly. As a friend." (L1193)
"In some ways, being both an exorcist and an atheist, I'm like a tightrope walker who knows the knots will hold but kind of resents it." (L1242)
Sidenote, but the rest of that paragraph rather irritates me. Why is it that all these authors are so self-satisfied about their virulent athiesm? Since it's apparently okay to be intolerant to Christians because of their intolerance to athiests, by that logic, it should be okay for the Christians to be intolerant to the athiests. I don't think all the sneering is getting anyone anywhere.
When God has abandoned you and the devil is snapping at your heels, what you really need on your side is a bigger devil." (L1286)
"Metamorphic ontology, a phrase that's both resonant and anodyne, hiding itself coyly behind Ancient Greek polysyllables like a coquette peeping out from behind her fan. It means the study of the undead: science's sheepish and undignified scramble to catch up with recent events in the afterlife, especially as they impact on this one. Ontology ferrets into the nature of being; metamorphosis is change. Translation: 'When they're dead, people chang einto some bloody scary things. Let's talk some serious Latin about it.'" (L1461)
[01/14/14]
"'Meta-conspiracy thrillers...where the conspiracy is part of a bigger conspiracy,' he said. 'When you think you've worked it out, but all you did was tear away the first layer of wallpaper. Like those dreams where you wake up sweating but, hey, you're still asleep and it's just another dream...that's how the world is, Castor. You just didn't figure out yet who's dreaming you." (L1637)
"Something...I'm still trying to put it together. Ask me about it the next time you come over." (L1706)
Stupid. Never say anything like that. It's as bad as saying, "I know who the murderer is!" in an Agatha Christie. You always end up dead. Or in this case, deader.
"We're looking for something that was close to him," Sam explained. "Physically or emotionally, doesn't matter which - best of all would be something that was both. Some object that he kept with him and thought about a lot." (L2220)
A bit tactless, I know, but why not use Fix or Pen?
"Where does faithful come into the equation? It's just a word you use to hobble someone you love. To tie them to you. It's a weapon the weak use against the strong." (L2565)
"Maybe you're more concerned about your own righteousness than you are about helping your friend." (L2680)
"Following the demon's terrifying corkscrew logic was like trying to figure-skate on the pitching deck of an icebreaker." (L2998)
Here's my bet:
the Ice-Maker's daughter is going to be used for the sacrifice.
Speaking of which, what the fuck? "Wow, there are creepy demon summonings scattered around my friends' houses! Let me leave them there! That will be fun!"Ridiculous.
Also, I get that he's trying to do the whole scifi/fantasy "new facet" thing with Abusive Juliet. "We all know abusive men are terrible. What if it's a woman? What then?"
Well, it doesn't work with me. It's still domestic abuse. Sympathy = -infinity.
And that "him" is totally not Gil.
[01/15/14]
"So it's a demon."
"Yes. It's a demon.""And how do we kill it?"
"Kill it?" Juliet's flawless brow frowned. "Why would I want to kill it? It smells of home." (L3922)
Oshieeeot....
"Why does any of this matter to you? If you save some bunch of people you don't really know and don't really care aout, is that going to make you feel any better about letting Asmodeus get free and kill somebody you did care about? Because that's what this is about, isn't it? The redemption train. You're standing on the footplate and sounding the whistle, Castor." (L4211)
[01/16/14]
"What goes around, comes around, and it turns out to be a chainsaw blade." (L4235)
"There are limits to how far you can change yourself. I've come to the end of an arc, Castor, and I'm swinging back." (L4352)
"Hell is coming to Earth, one piece at a time. Not the sky falling, but the ground opening up under our feet. There's nowhere that's safe to stand anymore." (L4675)
OK, that totally is going to end up as the title of my review. Also, interesting that it's apparently Chicken Licken in the UK. It's Chicken Little in the US. We can't be having with those nonsense words.
"I want an anchor in case things go Pete Tong on me." (L4675)
DUDE. It's MORE COCKNEY RHYMING SLANG. Brilliant! I seriously had no idea anyone ever used it unironically. Or maybe Fix is using it ironically.
[L4715] Wow. This is, like, the worst idea ever. Cheers, Fix. Amongst all your gawdawful insane, myopic, idiotic, terrible ideas, this one is definitely up there. Congrats.
[01/17/14]
[68%] Oshit. That's Juliet, isn't it? The naming of beasts... Oshit.
"It's just that I don't see the dead as the enemy. If the MOU find out you can trap ghosts in boxes, that's going to be a bad day for ghosts."
"But you're alive, so what do you care?"
"I'm alive," I agreed, "but I'm planning to be dead one day [...] if it comes to a fight, Trudie, we've lost."
"You can't believe that, Castor," Trudie implored me, her face twisted in almost visceral dismay. "You can't."
"It's just a matter of time," I said. "Living versus dead? Sooner or later, we all defect to the other side." (73%)
[75%] God, Fix. You are so very, very stupid. WHY ARE YOU GIVING HER YOUR PHONE? IT HAS YOUR CONTACTS ON IT. AND YOU THINK THIS ISN"T A SCHEME? Come to think of it, is there any evidence that Jenna-Jane didn't set the whole thing up? Does Jenna-Jane know who Sue is?
"It was the rule of names [...] 'And whatsoever he called them, that they became.' As though they hadn't been anything up until the, and their names pinned them down. [...] We bring them by using their names, and we send them away by using their names. The names have got all the power in them, even now. So I drove that evil fucker out of me by driving in my own name, every few inches, until he had no place he couldn't go that wasn't marked as mine." [77%]
Ahahahaha. And they have Rafi's confirmaiton picture. Which implies that they might be able to use his confirmation name, the name given to him as a follower of God.
The real question: what does Asmo want with Juliet? Can one demon free another? Then why not call one up from Hell? It's not like demons are in short supply.
[01/18/14]
[85%] Is it me, or is everyone who hits on Fix dead?
"I guess people only want as much history as they can easily carry around." (93%)
"Do you ever wish you were part of this?" Trudie asked, indicating with a toss of her head the scuttling commuters, the street cleaners, the shopkeepers taking down their shutters on the station concourse.
"Of life, you mean?" I asked, surprised by the question. "No. Not much. I'd rather be an ironic commentator." (93%)
Hm.
~~Moved from GR~~
It all starts with a jailbreak.
Felix "Fix" Castor, aided by the succubus Juliet, daringly swipe Fix's demon-possessed friend out from under the noses of the sadistic doctor who wants to take him apart to study him. Fix is just beginning to catch his breath when the police arrive on his doorstep. To his surprise, however, Fix isn't carted off to jail for kidnapping; instead, he is taken to the scene of a near-fatal assault. Much to his chagrin, the police didn't ask him over for his supernatural senses--they just want him to explain why "F Castor" is scrawled across the car window in blood. When Fix learns that the victim of the attack was a childhood enemy, his quest to discover the meaning behind the message leads him back into his murky past and into a darkening future.
This book left me breathless--and not just because I read it at the gym. It wasn't just the atmosphere and characters, or the scenes that ripped my heart into shreds, or the plot that kept me guessing into the second half of the book, or even the flawless worldbuilding; it was the visceral, visual nature of the scenes Carey painted and the way he used the template and tropes of pulp to delve into the duality and hypocrisy of human nature. Throughout the series, one of my favourite aspects has been Carey's use of the supernatural conflict as a metaphor for the story's more human tragedies-- a ghost's speech is stolen from her in the same way that her life as an illegal immigrant and prostitute left her without a voice, or spirits that physically steal men's bodies in much the same way that their entrepreneurial ruthlessness has trampled others.[1] This book explores a new theme: self-harm in all of is manifestations, from the supernatural to the mundane.
The location, too, the Salisbury estate, is one of Carey's best: Fix describes it as
"One step closer to Heaven....streets eighty feet of the ground...a city in the air...leave your worries on the ground, take to the skies and live clean. Only it turned out that you left a lot of other stuff on the ground, too... closer to Heaven, maybe, but you bring your weather with you."
It is a Babel whose towers were built to rival Heaven and is thus inevitably doomed to failure. Within this fallen city of all-to-human gods, we have a young boy who forsook his innocence of youth and apparently jumped from the airy balconies.
[I loved the imagery of the boy's death; his fall--his fall from grace--leads to the creation of a demon. I think Fix's references to Milton and Paradise Lost aren't coincidental.]
Throughout the series, the atrocities that Castor faces are, by and large, man-made. Every aspect of the world speaks of man's inhumanity to man; even the supernatural beings are, at their core, people. Ghosts, loup-garou, and zombies are people who have been refined by death into something both more and less human, and even the actions of demons are inexorably shaped by the humans who summon them into the mortal plane.
[The reveal about the true nature of demons was stunning; it came as a shock to me, yet was such a natural fit for the world that Carey had built that it had all the satisfaction of a last puzzle piece fitting into place. We have the contrasting paths of Juliet and Mark; Juliet seeks to understand/remember what it is to be human, while Mark strips away all self other than pain and fury.]
Through Castor, Carey deconstructs the hero. Throughout, we see a man who is willing to shoulder the responsibilities of others, to throw himself into the fray for friends and strangers. One little oddity stuck out to me: both his mother and brother call him "Felix," so Fix must have bestowed his nickname, with all of its semantic baggage, on himself. To protect and rescue--to fix, in fact--is the role of the hero, yet over and over, Carey has shown us the consequence of choice and the arrogance and unbearable guilt that underlie this apparent selflessness. As one character tells Fix,
You persist in thinking that...the whole world is full of the waste products of other people's mistakes? That your role in life is to clean them up, and to take the thanks for it?
[...and thus the inevitable tragedy.]
Castor's tendency to involve himself stems from both his own desire for absolution and an innate arrogance, for why does he believe he has the right, the strength, to make decisions that impact so many? Yet Fix is only one example of this hypocrisy; this duality of saviour and destroyer within the novel.
[Anita first saves the child Fix from a fall to protect the brother of the man she loves, then later pushes him off a bridge to protect her son; his injuries, especially the punctured lung, echo Kevin's, and the words she whispers to Fix as she throws him off--that it will be all right--are the words unsaid when she saved him before. Matty, the literal father figure, can offer grace and forgiveness to his children in God, yet cannot save his own son from sinking into despair. Anita indirectly comments on the ultimate irony of Father Matthew's profession when she finally decides to submit to Kevin:
"I don't deserve any better...look at me, Richie. Look how I'm living. He'll put a roof over our heads. He'll be a father to Mark. Fuck knows, somebody's got to be."
Even Kevin "saves" Anita even as he destroys her, just as Fix, in a different way, "saves" Rafi from the ministrations of Jenna-Jane only to trigger the dissolution of his soul.]
Carey's exploration of self-harm is equally complex and multi-layered. Self-harm is itself a paradox; it is a way to act out on one's self-hatred; a way of keeping silence while voicelessly screaming for help, for redemption. It is a form of self-punishment, of hatred and disgust so deep that only disfiguring the vessel can relieve the pressure. Yet while it provides a temporary sense of absolution, it is not constructive, and one quickly becomes addicted to that wire in the blood, that ecstatic moment of release. One of the characters, Mark, speaks to this paradoxical sense of transformation:
"If I could talk, I'd talk. It's the easy choice.
But I can't, so my knife must be my voice...
I take the blade and it just needs one stroke.
It comes out, but changes as it flows.
Water becomes wine. My wound becomes a rose."
Through another character who "[carves] out his indignation on his wrists and forearms", Carey captures how this form of silent self-expression, ostensibly a release of anger against the self, may truly target the world. Self-harm is, at its core, a selfish act, for it is an absolute, egoistical focus on the self even in the annihilation of self. Throughout, Carey provides perspectives and consequences, but neither fetishizes nor condemns.[2] As is typical, Fix is more straightforward and sees the cutting as an ecstatic, sexually-tinged escape, yet his typical lack of subtlety and self-knowledge itself adds another layer to Carey's portrayal. For Fix himself is self-destructive: he goes out of his way to damage his potential relationships before they have a chance to bloom; in his thoughts, he tortures himself with endless slashes to his psyche by going over and over his own guilt without ever thoroughly analysing and altering his behaviour. It is the same vicious cycle of self-hatred and self-destruction, and the scars it leaves are just as deep.
The book is indeed a fast-paced thriller with a satisfying mystery and tight worldbuilding, but also something more. Fix's description of a news archive of past tragedies perfectly captured my emotions:
"And in that typographic ocean, dark shapes moved of their own volition, against the sluggish tides. People hurt and killed each other, or themselves; broke against pavements, were impaled on railings, swallowed razor blades, carved gnomic messages on their own flesh or the flesh of their loved ones. There was blood, and there was pain. It drew me in, until I couldn't see the land any more."
[1] Yep, I like my metaphors blatant.
[2] I think Carey truly sought to understand; in the dedication, he thanks an anonymous "A" for conversations and the basis for the poem.
~~Other links~~
My review of The Devil You Know (Felix Castor #1)
My review of Vicious Circle (Felix Castor #2)
My review of Dead Men's Boots (Felix Castor #3)
My review of The Naming of Beasts (Felix Castor #5)
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