This comes across as absolutely chaotic, but in a really interesting way. I like the structure of it, too - each part is told from multiple points of view, from a variety of different characters. This is pretty common in a lot of the books that I read, but it's more often that the multiple perspectives have a different chapter each, for instance. Here the characters' points of view last anything from a couple of paragraphs to several pages. It's a really interesting technique, and I think it's one that I'd like to try on one of my own upcoming projects.

I admit that the story's pretty grim. Those multiple characters include scorned lovers and criminals and ghosts, even, as relationships change and fall apart. There's a serial killer, there's a pair of brothers who murder their own dad. And in the middle of it all, there's the black cathedral, being built by the community in a vast expression of religious outpouring, which is all well and good except it seems that the cathedral is cursed. Evil, even. That's what tips this over into magical realism for me, even more than the ghosts and the small expressions of magic. The cathedral's being built in an area of extreme deprivation, of extreme social dysfunction, and it's easy to imagine that all the things that are happening around it - the murders, the abusive relationships - are a result of that dysfunction. It's a plausible explanation... but it's always undercut by that looming, unfinished monstrosity, that both attracts and repels people at once and puts the untrustworthy at the centre of the narrative.