Posted by Hello.
Welcome to the last review from my initial batch of 25 (Kristen took 5 and picked a semifinalist). I did not intentionally leave the strangest book in my batch for last, but that’s what happened. I am going to struggle with this review because where to even begin? How do I even…? LOL what even is this book? While looking at the cover you may notice a bunch of psychedelic looking mushrooms on the cover. That there is a clue that this book is going to be a fucking trip.
So….Bjorn lives in Canada, ya? And he’s of Norse heritage, all right? And so one day he’s like fuckit, I’m going to college in Houston (which is so deeply funny to me because Kristen, my SPFBO partner, is a Canadian that lived in Texas for a while). Bro has a real hard time fitting in because he says things like, “that’s not what ghosts really look like” on Halloween as if all of the party goers are getting it wrong. He sees ghosts, he has Sight, but no one else around him does. This leads to scenes like playing strip poker while smoking weed and watching a demon crawl out from under someone’s bed and Bjorn is just laughing his ass off. So, like, what is this book about? I’m honestly still not sure. We’ve got Bjorn trying to save his friends and roommates from demons and other spirits that want to harm them, but this book was just chaos from start to finish.
Bjorn can see inside people’s souls and memories, and sometimes he can fall right into their memories experiencing their emotions and and live their experiences like they’re his own. It can be super intense, especially when he’s inside their minds as they die. This book can take a 180 turn from a funny scene that made me giggle a bit to being suddenly horrifying in just a sentence or two. Like, “haha, wait wtf?” He’s able to enter his roommates’ dreams and things like that which created even more super trippy scenes that didn’t even involve drugs. I was never quite sure how much was real and how much was a dream. I wouldn’t even call this an inconsistent tone or jarring, but rather an intentional writing choice to create an overall theme of chaos. There’s this whole love triangle thing going on and I never really knew what was going to happen there and then — ya, that didn’t resolve the way I thought it would.
This is set in the 1980s and it’s more or less our world from the ’80s. There’s a whole fuckton of different types of lore shoved into this book. You’ll read about Indigenous spirits, beings like The Crone, and various Norse gods like Loki and whatnot. It’s interesting because when he gets visited by The Crone she doesn’t speak like an ancient deity, she has a modern vernacular and it made for some funny moments.
This book is only 200 pages long and so when I got to the end I was like, “wow, we’re ending there???” I also think this is a stand alone book which makes the ending even more wtf. It’s not that it ended on a cliff hanger or anything, it’s not incomplete, it’s just wtf. Wherever you think this book is going, you’re going to be wrong. I did make it to the end of this book which means for right now it’s safe.