KIN by Kealan Patrick Burke
My rating: 3/5 cats
for some reason, i thought this was going to be another one of those downtrodden working poor novels i so love. damn that cover: barn, grass, isolated-looking rural atmosphere. i didn’t even realize that blob in the foreground was a nude girl. oops.
i knew this had a horror angle; i knew it was going to have some—you know—cannibalism in it, but that’s never bothered me any; i just for some reason thought this would have some of the poetic literary language i love from these books—the way everything is expressed so beautifully juxtaposed against the harsh realities of the landscape and the hopelessness of the characters—the diamonds in the rough…i thought it would be like Kings of the Earth, which review i so helpfully floated recently to pave the way for this one. you’re welcome.
instead, i got this:
First, his nose was broken and throbbing like a teenager’s pecker at the prom.
and that sums up my gripe with this book; it lacks subtlety.
it is this:
instead of this:
and that’s fine—i don’t read horror often, but i have definitely read some fine horror novels in my time. this one is only okay. it did have some wonderful gross-out moments (elizabeth—skip this)
There was no momma anymore, he said, not the way they remembered her. Now she was a mass of suppurating bedsores, fused to the mattress where old wounds had healed and the torn flesh and pus had hardened to form a kind of second skin around the material and bedsprings beneath. The mattress, once plump and soft, had been worn down by her weight to almost nothing, a wafer thin slice bent in the middle, pungent, soggy and stained by the fluids that had soaked down from her corpulent body over the years. The boys took turns washing and tending to her wound, grooming her, scooping out the large quantities of fecal matter that gathered between her enormous thighs, then giving the remaining stain a cursory, half-hearted scrub before leaving her to wallow in the vestiges of her own waste.
and that is not even the worst of it—let’s just say that i will never read the word “rebirth” the same again. shudder.
this book has mostly four- and five-star ratings on goodreads which surprises the crap out of me. am i just being star cat-stingy? did i miss something? were my expectations just different so that they clouded my appreciation of what this book was? have i just read too many better examples of god-blinded individuals killing in the name of their skewed worldviews?
probably.
it tickles me that one of the tags this book has on here is “military” and yes—two of the characters have spent time overseas, being exposed to and somewhat numbed to violence which definitely shaped their characters, but i highly doubt that fans of tom clancy or larry bond are going to derive the same kind of pleasure from this splatter-book as they are from their helicopter tales. just…be warned.
and this is the book that did it. this is the book that may have convinced me to get one of them newfangled e-readers. because it is out of print, and i had it on my to-read list because lou had recommended it to me, and it sounded like something i would like, but if i had actually tracked down a used copy of it, well then now i would be stuck with this book i thought was okay, but i will never reread. (i read this on a store-borrowed nook) so… maybe. i am considering it. because for 5 bux i could have read this and moved on with my life, without cluttering up this tiny-ass apartment of mine. and as much a i love the thrill of the hunt and the buying of books an abe.com and such, well, the e-readers make things that much easier. nothing to get lost in the mail, nothing to cause book avalanches in the middle of the night, nothing for the cat to throw up on. (well, something very expensive for her to throw up on…) i don’t know. just know that i am considering it. and i will reserve my book-hunting for more “guaranteed” good reads.
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