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Book Review: Poe by J. Lincoln Fenn

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Poe by J. Lincoln Fenn

  • Method of Obtaining: I received a copy from the publisher.
  • Published by:  47North
  • Release Date:  10.22.2013

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It’s Halloween, and life is grim for 23-year-old Dimitri Petrov. It’s the one-year anniversary of his parents’ deaths, he’s stuck on page one thousand of his Rasputin zombie novel, and he makes his living writing obituaries.

But things turn from bleak to terrifying when Dimitri gets a last-minute assignment to cover a séance at the reputedly haunted Aspinwall Mansion.

There, Dimitri meets Lisa, a punk-rock drummer he falls hard for. But just as he’s about to ask her out, he unwittingly unleashes malevolent forces, throwing him into a deadly mystery. When Dimitri wakes up, he is in the morgue—icy cold and haunted by a cryptic warning given by a tantalizing female spirit.

As town residents begin to turn up gruesomely murdered, Dimitri must play detective in his own story and unravel the connections among his family, the Aspinwall Mansion, the female spirit, and the secrets held in a pair of crumbling antiquarian books. If he doesn’t, it’s quite possible Lisa will be the next victim.

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My Review:

I’ve been curious for a while about the Amazon Break-Through Novel Awards, and so with Halloween on the horizon and a driving urge to read more horror (i.e. scary stuff but not too gruesome) I picked out Poe by J. Lincoln Fenn when I saw it offered by the publisher for review.  For the most part, I got exactly what I was looking for.  Ghosts, spirits, bloody, scary bits, bad guys getting what was coming to them and sometimes the good guys too.  I was interested in the overarching theme of the novel, but there were quite a few detours that had to be explored first before getting to the ending I desired.

It’s those detours I want to talk about here; because, honestly, if someone were to ask me to sum up this book in one word I’d say the word “mess.” Because that’s what it felt like as I was reading it.  It was all over the place, and I’m not talking chronologically.  Instead, I felt like I’d been put into a cart on one of those mining rails and just pushed allowed to go whichever way the rails decided to take me.  So, let me rephrase that to a two word description: organized mess.

For a horror story though, this one had all of the classic elements.  The strange, haunted hotel (reminded me of The Shining), the ghostly spirits that accompanied strange hotel, the seances, the murders, the psychopaths, the mystery, the running for danger, and added all into the mix, an oddly likeable, but still pretty clumsy, main character. Those ingredients made up for the, at times, sloppy organization of the story, and kept me reading until the end.

But when I get down to it. Halloween is a messy holiday.  Horror stories are messy things.  There’s no set pattern, unless you are seriously into maps and planning things out like my mother is on Black Friday, so for its intended purpose, as a great thriller flick-like read on a spooky holiday, Poe worked for me and I enjoyed my time in Fenn’s make-believe world.

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