Jacob
Schwartz is a rich New Yorker that has spent many years in India studying
mystical stuff and yoga. He is the absentee head of a charitable foundation
funded by an inheritance from his shady uncle. Blake House is one of their
holdings and is an apartment co-operative where some crazy suicides have been
happening recently. Jacob is sent home by his teacher to deal with the bad
spiritual mojo happening at the building. He goes back to find that some shit
is going down. There is a Satanist, a witch, nasty real estate guys, his
cousins hate him, and generally everyone is a jerk. None of these characters
are working together towards their evil plans, they just generally all are up
to no good in and around the Blake House.
This might
be one of the worst books I’ve ever read. The narrative starts off fairly
straightforward with the main push of the plot being a witch trying to get some
revenge for the death of her mother. It initially tries to set things up with a
heavy matriarchal bent. The witch has an agenda that includes women being
powerful. But that is almost immediately tossed away when the same character
then is shown to be psychic and able to influence people with her mind. But
then she has spell books and collects components for her castings in a most unpleasant
way. But then she is psychic again. I don’t know if the author ever figured out
what exactly he was going for. The plot never defines the villain or her agenda
or even what the hell she is.
The
writing itself is terrible. Characters are introduced and quickly forgotten or
buried for long stretches only to show up again to die. This means that I was
having to stop and figure out who the hell I was reading about. I kept having
to backtrack to find out who the latest death was. This is further confused
when more characters appear in the story with the idea that maybe I should know
who they are, only to find out that they weren’t introduced at all and exist
solely to die a couple of pages later. In particular there is a couple that
jumps from the roof of Blake House, so they can land on a mother and her
children who were also just introduced so that the author can describe a fetus
popping out of its mother’s stomach!
Normally I
don’t make things personal when reviewing but this author, Adrian Savage, is an
asshole. This book is so freaking racist in the most casual of ways. There is a
black female character that spends most of the story being used as a sex
partner for the white males in the book. She also happens to have conservative
views, so the more “enlightened” white characters call her an “Aunt Thomasina”.
Yeah white characters calling a black character an Uncle Tom. We also have a
Jewish character named Ira that is described as an ugly large nosed hairy man.
Was the author looking at some Nazi literature when creating this character?
These are just the two most obvious examples but there is shit like this all
thru the book.
I’d never
heard of Adrian Savage before. He only wrote two books this being the second of
them. I honestly don’t know how this got published. I could see the content I
mentioned above being in a book from the sixties or seventies, but this was
published in the late eighties. By then crap like this didn’t make it to print.
Toss in the fact that in general it is just a poorly written piece of garbage
with lousy characters and a muddled plot that makes zero sense it boggles my
mind it ever made it past an editor and onto the shelves. Don’t read this book!
© Copyright 2018 John Shatzer
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