The Crooked Mark: A quick Review
“The Crooked Mark” starts with a murder.
The main character (Matt) introduces us to the core premise of the story that sometimes, when a person miraculously survives an accident that should have killed them, they are marked by the devil to be an unwitting source of bad luck in the world that will escalate until it's getting people killed.
Matt and his father are a part of an organization dedicated to hunting these people and setting them on fire.
The opening chapters of the story show one of these hunts going “Well” in that Matt’s father becomes convinced a person is Marked, they set the person on fire, and get away scott free. These chapters also detail Matt’s internal doubt and disgust with his actions.
The rest of the book is Matt’s first hunt on his own, even his father has left the state to pursue a different target.
From here, things get complicated. Matt catches feelings for the girl he’s hunting, he develops a sense of normalcy he doesn’t want to abandon, and without his father to quell them he has to confront his ever present doubts.
The Crooked Mark was a fascinating book, to say the least. “Hunter of the supernatural falling for who they're hunting” is not a new concept by any definition, but the spin of “Does the thing I’m hunting even exist” adds a new level to it that I quite enjoyed.
A not insignificant portion of the book is Matt trying to blend in with the highschool his target is attending, and something I quite enjoyed was the, oftentimes aggressively, normal conversations he was having with his peers and then cutting to Matt’s internal struggle with his mission. One moment he’s flirting with a girl and wondering if she likes him or he likes her and the next he’s struggling with the “reality” that he might have to set her on fire in order to survive.
In a lot of ways “The Crooked Mark” feels tailor-made for me, if I were in the woods and saw this book on the ground I’d assume a trap had been set. Magic, Mystery, and themes about self determination in the face of forces arrayed against you.
It’s not perfect though, I’ve managed to write a review of the book and not really mention any characters other than Matt and his Father. His target and friends at school are all interesting, don't get me wrong, but they’re normal and when the book introduces this grand mystery it’s hard to be too invested in the normalcy.
I’m willing to buy the romance between Matt and his target (Rae) but the two of them are normal, it's a highschool romance, it’s sweet but that’s all that it is. The appeal of the normalcy is a big part of Matt’s story and I found it to be lacking, but maybe I’m a cynic so we can move on from there.
All in all, a solid book that was definitely worth my time.
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