This third book in Christian Read’s occult noir series strips away protagonist Lark’s certainties and resources, leaving him vulnerable and exposed to weird goings on in an unnaturally quiet country town.
At the end of Devil City, Lark was forced to give up his home in The City due to a geas. In the opening of Ghost City we meet him on an aimless bus-ride, traveling without a set destination or purpose. He notices a marking, a rune he used to employ back in The City, on the side of the road. Knowing full well that this is probably a trap, Lark disembarks and visits the town of Crosscut.
“Everyone is sick here. This is a fever-town. The temperature radiates up from beneath the streets and these people are just boils on the skin.”
Read takes Lark well out of his comfort zone, transitioning from urban noir to country splatterpunk. Junk and black magic have hollowed out the townsfolk of Crosscut. Worryingly Lark appears to be acting on a death-wish, his grip on sanity slipping. Is the voice in his head telling him to run away survival instinct, or the beginnings of a psychotic break?
Ghost City’s prose reflects the stripped back setting. Brief terse sentences and a strained monologue, feel like Lark talking to himself because he has no remaining connections to anyone left. The monstrous secrets at the heart of Crosscut are in turn rendered in gory, violent and messy imagery.
Read shows his research with an impressive amount of religious and occult literature informing the plot. There is a casual aside on surrealist poet Robert Desnos for instance, introduced not simply for effect but as a way of describing his conception of how magical practice works – essentially a worshipful artform.
Read continues to ground his fiction in studied detail, while excelling at abrupt and nasty shocks of violence.
- Emmet O’Cuana
