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Hello, hello, hello!
This is our second to last review! Kristen actually DNF’d this one and so my review will be the only review for this one. Fear not, author, I enjoyed myself so the score won’t be low.
The opening scene is set in 2018 Chicago, where we meet a main character whose job is to seal fissures between the Nether and the waking world to heal people suffering from fluke infestations. A fluke is a being from the Nether that feeds on the souls of the living. They come in different colors, each linked to a specific negative emotion—red for anger, along with blue, yellow, and so on. They’re drawn to different personalities and affect their hosts in distinct ways, and many infected people don’t even realize they’re sick and will actively resist help. This reminds me an eensy weensy bit of Lightbringer in that emotions are tied to colors which are tied to various kinds of magic, but that’s where the similarities stop.
Liam O’Connor, the MC, is one of the only people with the ability to traverse from the Nether to the waking world and heal people. He doesn’t like the job; it wears on him, and he loses people he cares about. Flukes can be dangerous, and people he loves die, and he’s left as an alcoholic, and he’s barely functioning.
This book does not hold your hand; you get dropped in a fully realized world, and it’s up to you to figure out what’s going on most of the time. It’s rare when something about the world is given in an infodump format.
This is a super, super slow-burn romance. I mean, it starts with a prologue that’s longer than most of the subsequent chapters, so there’s a lot of set up as well, so I would imagine some folks may have a little difficulty getting into this book due to the long wind up to the “real events” as it were. I knew this was supposed to be a romance since it was advertised as a romance in the blurb on Goodreads, but I was confused as to why it was a romance for a large portion of the book. Much of this book focuses on a plot that’s not a romance, so for those who may be put off by the genre, this could be a good one to try since so much of the book has a focus outside the romance. This is actually pretty dark for a romance, too. A lot of the character development revolves around depression, addiction, loss, trauma, etc.
This could be called a kind of body horror since the character is diving in and out of people’s minds and mental landscapes; it’s pretty trippy in that way, too. The person’s mind is called a “fren” and it’s kind of like walking around a physical location.
The plot took some turns, lol. I don’t feel like I can go much more into details other than the romance was not what I thought it would be. I was in the judge’s discord flipping my shit, like, “did y’all read this??!” This might appeal to people who like T. Kingfisher but wish it went a little darker and grittier. Like T. Kingfisher often does, the characters in this book are science-minded and often think things through in a logical kind of way with a lot of tinkering and testing of theories. I also feel that this kind of character-type mixed with a queer romance makes could mean the two audiences have a lot of overlap.
Overall, I enjoyed myself and I’d give this one a 7.0/10 for the scoreboard!