The End of the Sentence
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It begins with a letter from a prisoner As he attempts to rebuild his life in rural Oregon after a tragic accident, Malcolm Mays finds himself corresponding with Dusha Chuchonnyhoof, a mysterious entity who claims to be the owner of Malcolm's house, jailed unjustly for 117 years. The prisoner demands that Malcolm perform a gory, bewildering task for him. As the clock ticks toward Dusha's release, Malcolm must attempt to find out whether he's assisting a murderer or an innocent. The End of the Sentence combines Kalapuya, Welsh, Scottish and Norse mythology, with a dark imagined history of the hidden corners of the American West. Maria Dahvana Headley and Kat Howard have forged a fairytale of ghosts and guilt, literary horror blended with the visuals of Jean Cocteau, failed executions, shapeshifting goblins, and magical blacksmithery. In Chuchonnyhoof, they've created a new kind of Beast, longing, centuries later, for Beauty.
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Mixed feelings about this book. I definitely wouldn't describe it as creepy or eerie. Dark, yes, but not really creepy; felt more like a ghost story rather than a horror story. I guess the imagery didn't work for me; I'm too jaded perhaps.
I liked the imagery though, I can visualise them easily, just not creepily, as I get the feeling that the author was going for that effect. Perhaps it was the protagonist himself. He suffered a tragic accident and is not quite mentally stable. So some of the supposedly eerie happenings are too effectively chalked off as hallucinations. It's just a rather odd how easily he accepts the strange happenings.
The story is built off of Scottish (?) and Native American folk lore. I didn't look them up, but the plot was fine. There were a few spots where the descriptive narrative fails. I believe it's the author's style of writing thought patterns or internal monologue as short sentences. The end result is that it gets confusing sometimes, not quite sure what the author is trying to describe.
The ending is fine, although a bit rushed. All the fact dumping also happens at the end, so the pacing's a bit uneven. There were also a few loose ends that weren't addressed, which just ended up as plot conveniences.
