#bay's end

[michaelpatrickhicks]

Review: Everything is Horrible Now by Edward Lorn

My rating: 4 of 5 stars After reading and naming Edward Lorn's The Sound of Broken Ribs my number one read of 2017, it was high time I got around to reading more of the dude's stuff, his Bay's End books in particular. Over the course of 2018, I've been able to catch up on this series, with the exclusion of Fog Warning, and one thing that's immediately noticeable is just how much Lorn has grown as an author since Bay's End. Everything is Horrible Now, the penultimate chapter in this All Things Lead to the End cycle, is his most adeptly written, and most complicated, work to date. If, as one character explains here, time is like a pretzel, then traveling through Bay's End is like peeling an onion. There are layers and layers of complexity here, and the further you dig beneath the skin the more things start to sting (and yes, over the course of this series as a whole, sometimes there are plenty of tears). Right from the opening paragraph, you can sense that Everything is Horrible Now is something of a departure from previous Bay's End books. Through a highly omniscient third-person perspective, we get a rough inkling that there's a grandiosity to Lorn's scope here. Even while the previous two books have dabbled in varying degrees with cosmic horror, it's immediately clear that this particular element will have a significantly larger role to play in these here narrative underpinnings. And, hot damn, does it ever. It starts off simply enough, if such a thing can be said of the Bay's End bishop, Father George, murdering his family before taking his own life. What follows, though, is a densely plotted narrative that twists its way through a large contingent of well-developed characters (some familiar), meditations on the nature of god and religion and the irreligious and the evil that religious fundamentalism can foment, and the structure of time itself. It's a doozy, simply put. There's a lot going on here, and Lorn navigates the highways and byways of Bay's End with aplomb. I good and truly dug the exploration of one homosexual character's relationships and forced conversion therapy treatments, which reminded me a bit of the old British TV series The Prisoner. As an added bonus, for all all the goofballs out there still complaining that a gay character's sexuality must somehow be integral to the plot (despite this never being an issue with straight character's sexuality), well, Lorn sees you, has heard your silly complaints, and will now proceed to make your head explode. Lorn gets a metric ton of stuff right in Everything is Horrible Now, and the book maintains a steady pace, giving up a narrative that is impossible to shake loose and escape from. Not everything is perfect, though, and a few elements feel slightly half-baked, such as a rape survivor and a ghost baby that never quite mesh, particularly in light of how the overarching narrative resolves itself. The book's ending itself is both an intellectual curiosity and a point of contention, one that I'm not quite able to fully resolve at this time. As with the finale to The Bedding of Boys, Lorn has constructed one hell of a lead-in to the 2019 series finale in No Home for Boys that has me itching to see how this all wraps up. It puts some particular pieces on the game board that will no doubt have an incredible impact on what comes next, and what has come before, and I'm damn excited to see how it shakes out. On the other hand, without spoiling the particulars, it's also the type of ending I don't typically enjoy on the surface. It's not emotionally satisfying, but it is intellectually and philosophically intriguing and has me chomping at the bit to see what comes next. I feel like I might not be able to adequately square away the finale to Everything is Horrible Now until we've reached the end of Bay's End proper. It's also a bit of a monkey wrench of an ending, in that I have absolutely no friggin' idea where Lorn's taking all this. Literally anything can happen at this point, which is certainly exciting, and I'm damn well gonna be here for it. [Note: Although I purchased the signed/limited edition Thunderstorm hardcover of Everything is Horrible Now, this review is based on an electronic ARC of the forthcoming retail edition provided by the author.] View all my reviews

[michaelpatrickhicks]

Review: The Bedding of Boys by Edward Lorn

My rating: 4 of 5 stars Nevada Barnes is your average, run of the mill, hormonally supercharged fourteen-year-old. Regina Corsi, however, is decidedly atypical - a woman in her thirties, she is a hebephile and a serial killer. She seduces children, uses them to satiate her sexual desires, and then brutally murders them. Aiding her in her crimes is a strange white sheeted creature, appropriately named Ghost, who consumes Regina's victims and scrubs clean the various crime scenes in supernatural ways. Once Regina lays eyes on Nevada, neither of their lives will ever be the same...nor, I'm sure, will the small Ohioan town of Bay's End. The Bedding of Boys is the third in Edward Lorn's Bay's End novels (there's a few short stories and novellas sets within this town's borders, as well), and although each can be read as a stand-alone work there's a hell of a lot of richness to be found throughout this series when taken as a whole. The End, as it's colloquially known, has a lot of history behind it and when read as a series you get the feel of a fully realized town, recognizing its familiar landmarks, shops, and citizens, as well as the seedy underbelly infecting this region. Bay's End is for Lorn what Derry and Castle Rock are for Stephen King. You don't have to read these books in any particular order, but I strongly recommend familiarizing yourself with Lorn's Bay's End and The Sound of Broken Ribs before hitting the sheets with this one. Feel free to ignore my advice, of course, but I suspect you'll want to know all you can about The End and its inhabitants well before this book reaches its climax. Fair warning, though - Lorn gets into some highly fucked up terrain here. The primary thrust behind The Bedding of Boys involves a significantly older woman seducing boys much, much younger than she. Regina is, simply put, a child rapist. Lorn pulls absolutely zero punches, and right from the book's very first chapter reader's are forced to bear witness to a handful of murders and a graphically detailed sexual assault of a minor. It's shocking and vulgar and deeply unsettling, and it sets the stage for all that follows. Once Nevada is introduced in the wake of Regina's bloody mayhem, you'll instantly worry for him and your anxiety will rise in creepily steady fashion as he becomes intimately familiar with Regina. Sex is filtered through the perspective of predator and prey, and whatever glimmers of romantic entanglements these characters may feel, Lorn never shies away from the horrific manipulations behind all of it. This isn't a Happily Ever After romance - this is straight-up horror. Sex here is a weapon, and it is wielded with profoundly deadly intent time and time again. Sex and horror have been intertwined forever, oftentimes purely for sheer titillation, or to make a point about female purity. This last point you can most surely disregard, as ain't nobody in Bay's End pure. The Bedding of Boys has a surprising amount of depth in its themes of sexual conquest, gender roles, and the animalistic nature of passion and the pursuit for sexual pleasure. Sex begets life, and life begets death. Sex and Death are the Alpha and the Omega, and carnality comes with a cost for each and every one of these characters, rippling through time to warp both minds and bodies alike. Like Stephen King and George R.R. Martin, Lorn enjoys flicking readers around like a yo-yo. He'll give you plenty of characters to care about, and he does an absolutely fantastic job writing teenage boys (as evidenced in the prior Bay's End), only to sucker-punch you and pull the rug out from beneath your feet. This an author who profoundly destroys his characters with masochistic glee, and there were a few times I wanted to reach out to him and ask him to stop, to leave these people alone, to not devastate them so utterly. But, hell, if I did that, it'd kinda ruin the whole point here, wouldn't it? There's a darkness in Bay's End. You can't plead with it, and you can't stop it. You can feel the way it eddies through the streets, disrupting the whole town and its people's lives. You can feel it building toward something, too, all throughout The Bedding of Boys. Something cataclysmic. All things lead to The End, after all. View all my reviews

[michaelpatrickhicks]

Review: Bay's End by Edward Lorn

My rating: 3 of 5 stars REMINDER: 3 stars on the Goodreads metric means "I liked it" and is in no way, shape, or form a negative rating. And in fact, I did like Bay's End, even as I have some mixed feelings about it. I believe Bay's End was Edward Lorn's first novel (although I could be wrong!), and it serves as a fine introduction to the town and landscape where a number of his other later works are set. It does have some of the creakiness and odd pacing issues of first novels, but as a coming of age story it also has plenty of heart and honesty, as well as a group of teens worth rooting for, and a clean, easy-going writing style that makes it compulsively readable. I must note, though, that I came into Bay's End having already read Lorn's incredible novel, The Sound of Broken Ribs, my #1 pick for best book of 2017, and in preparation for his latest release, The Bedding of Boys. While these are each stand alone titles, these initial two books are separated by a number of years wherein Lorn grew tremendously as an author. I don't mean this as a knock, nor do I wish to infer that Bay's End is by any means a bad book. It's actually quite a fine introduction to Lorn's style, a style that he has honed and improved on over the course of his career. We must all being somewhere, though, and Bay's End is a bit of a time capsule in that regard, and a fitting one at that. The story itself is a time capsule, as a haunted man recalls the summer of 1992. Then, Trey was twelve going on thirteen, and he's made a fast friendship with the new neighbor kid, Eddy, a bond that will last all of Trey's life, long after Eddy's untimely demise. It's a summer of first loves, near-death accidents, and the intrusion of adulthood upon adolescence far too soon. Eddy is foul-mouthed and brash, and after they run afoul of Officer Mack he has the bright idea of tossing cherry bombs into the cop's patrol car. It's a moment that changes the course of these boy's lives forever and embroils them in larger events, sinking them into the meaner, darker secrets hidden in Bay's End. As I said, I came into Bay's End after The Sound of Broken Ribs and a few of Lorn's other short horror stories, so color me surprised at the total lack of supernatural elements! I admit, I was expecting some kind of monster to rear its ugly head, and while there is definitely a fair share of ugly heads a-rearing, the horrors herein are strictly human. Bay's End, as we discover alongside Trey, has its fair share of dark corners and corrupted souls. My chief issue with the book, though, comes down to pacing. There were times where it simply felt like the story was moving too fast, and I wanted Lorn to ease off the gas pedal and explore the town and its people a bit more. Instead, we kind of race from one set piece of action to the next and there's not a lot of time to decompress and regroup. Such is the way of those teenage years, though, always on the go, in a hurry to get to the next big thing and rush through it for whatever next big thing lies beyond. As it is, Lorn covers a lot of ground and stumbles across a few unsavory characters along the way, but it also feels like an awful lot of stuff happening too soon. Mostly, I just wanted to spend more time with Trey, Eddy, Candy, and Sanders. I wanted to see more of their hijinx and eavesdrop on their foul-mouthed and unerringly accurate teenage talks. Adult Trey tells the part of his psyche haunted by Eddy and the ghosts of '92 that this is a story of only a few miles, but I could have gone for a longer journey and wouldn't have minded clocking a few more miles through Bay's End. View all my reviews