In his acknowledgements, Rosson calls this “a wild fever dream of a novel,” and he nailed it. Where to start with this feral read? Since it’s a horror/suspense novel, the first gory moment seems apt: when a crime boss’s enforcers threaten a man with a drug addiction who owes a payment and the man asks, “What’re you gonna do? Knock my teeth out?” He then goes on to do the job himself, with his own filthy fingers. The enforcers find a severed hand during their work, one that causes those nearby to feel the need to do tremendous violence, the urge “[slithering] in. It floats on a dark wave.” The gore gets more sophisticated—“make me a necklace from the heads of your children…make me a red veil from their latticed veins”—only adding to the supernatural head-spinning. At the same time, we follow the life…if he or it is alive…of a being called Saint Michael, a secret captive of the U.S. government. Saint Michael can sometimes see visions of future events, especially when periodically “encouraged” by the agonizing process of government agents trimming his wings. In counterpoint to the government actions we meet a musician, Katherine Moriarty, who was very successful in her day but now is agoraphobic, her closed-in life perhaps related to the bizarre goings-on elsewhere in the novel. All converge in a terrifying episode in Portland, Oregon, that will surely be a highlight of the movie that is already being made of this terrific novel. Every word here is crafted to impart just the right level of revulsion, fear, and, at times, wonder. Get ready for awards nods for this work as well as comparisons to the works of Cormac McCarthy and Justin Cronin.
