The Acolyte by Nick Cutter
My rating: 4/5 cats
when noir just isn’t rough enough, release nick cutter.
breathtakingly violent, there are situations in this book that made even ME squirm, and i’m basically just a jaded husk of “nothing fazes me, son.” this is his take on what can happen when organized religion steamrolls personal liberties, and it’s just brutal rolled in gruesome dusted with wrong. cutter’s previous two novels have had scenes of sad and wasteful violence (dear god, not the TURTLE!) but this one kicks the asses of all others on a scale that will make your brain recoil. in a good way, naturally. there is a scene towards the end of the book – just a little sentence or two involving eyeballs and what can be done to them that gave me the full-body shudders.
those if you with animal-cruelty triggers – do not enter. because this book nearly made me forget that poor turtle with dear god, not the FROGS!!!
it’s written in a very different style from both The Deep and The Troop. those were both written in the stephen-king-osphere, where creepy things happened to ordinary folks and the eeriness resulted from the familiarity of the characters and setting layered over by supernatural terrors. (okay, not so much the setting for The Deep, but we’ve all seen submarine movies, so it’s a familiarity once-removed.) and we’ve all seen and read religious/political dystopias, but cutter’s particular brand here is all his own. gritty and hardboiled, with wonderfully precise details in his world-building. it’s a crime story and a social commentary all at once, where the chosen few – the acolytes – administer violent justice upon religious and social dissenters in a christian fundamentalist nightmarescape, all told with an Ellroyian flavour. bombs and preachers, circuit freaks and animal sacrifice, shotguns that turn people into red mashed potato, cannibals and mercy kills and emphatically UNmerciful kills. and family.
it’s chilling and fast-paced, with very short punchy chapters and perfectly concise lines bigger than their word count:
Yeah, I could have.
which restraint punctuates a beautifully understated moment.
oh, it is a vicious book.
the thing is, i have met nick cutter, when he was wearing his craig davidson skin*, and he is such a sweet, affable gent. and he’s sweet and affable enough to have included an afterword here that basically says: “i am not a monster – this is just a book” where he apologizes for some of what he’s written and entreats you to not hold it against him. oh, canada…
so, while it is nothing like his first two in the cutterverse, it is a deviation, not a disappointment.
read it if you have the balls for it.
* not literally, obviously.
