Word Made Flesh, by Jack O'Connell **1/2

I was attracted to this book because the reviews described it as a mystery/detective story with supernatural/horror elements. I feel like there's got to be more of this kind of book, though there doesn’t seem to be; it's essentially cross-genre fiction, with a foot firmly planted in the detective world and lightly planted in the speculative fiction world. That made for a nice combination, even though I wasn't overly impressed with the concepts in the book. The imaginary city O'Connell creates is pretty cool, if slightly standard in its conception, but even that was a worthwhile setting for easily-readable fiction like this. This was to me a fine, quick, entertaining read in at atmosphere I enjoyed. In that sense, it's kind of like reading a Jim Thompson book, though I wouldn't say the atmosphere here is quite as distinctive as Thompson's. The similarity, though, is just that it's a good space to walk around in.

As for the space, it's pretty grim, with a couple of sequences that are genuinely horrific. It's not consistently that grim, but it is just often enough to remind the reader that that level of nastiness is possible. If this were a movie, it would almost always be taking place at night, in dark rooms and basements, with poor lighting.

The book wraps itself up a bit too tightly for my taste, and I wonder if subsequent books in this world (O'Connell's got several followups) would be more interesting because they might be allowed to just exist instead of explain everything. By that I mean that in this first book, the protagonist's history is explored in great detail, with much of the effort of the novel focused on getting to the heart of multiple simultaneous mysteries about his past and the history of the police, the bad guys, etc. I could imagine that in later books, this kind of explication might be unnecessary, though I'll probably never know since I doubt I'll read any more of them.
(Fall 2007)

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