It was alright. Nice voice cast assembled for it, but I have read so many things like it it’s not very shiny to me. I suspect if I’d read it sooner I’d have enjoyed it more.

In a quintessential, yet also satirical small Irish town, a woman walks into a gun shop, takes the first gun she sees, throws money at the appropriately dazed man, grabs some wrong ammo and gets in a cab. What follows is an often circumnavigated story about, again, a quintessential and satirized crime family that involves numerous murders—both past and “present”, incest, intense trauma, bad coping mechanisms, and the creation and ending of multiple narratives that allows those involved to go about their day-to-day.

Narrated from an anonymous person within the town, clearly more integrated in the rumour mill, as they’re able to elucidate on much more than all that, but conveys it all the same, I think one of Burns intentions is to implicate everyone, in one way or another. The crime family mostly all have named starting with J, and the story starts with a Doe and John Doe to make clear, as I see it, that to distinguish them further than to allow for their being different people going through the following motions, they might as well be anybody. The factions might be in any town. The well meaning bystanders, the same. The gender dynamics and the mechanisms that allows for the violence of all stripes—mostly toward girls and women, both, mind—are indicative of every town like it. But probably every place with the same socialization, even if the more specific factors like Ireland and Those Specific Factions are particular, it’s no question that this could occur in other families elsewhere.

It’s about people put into patterns not of their own making and holding them to account for it all the while not having anything systemic in society to address and break them out of them. There is a horrible insistence to these things. And Burns outright calls them evil. It’s vogue now to be speaking about moral relativism and grey morality and how people are both. The case that Burns brings us, though, is that there is also a lack of accountability and regardless of the trauma and unchecked behaviours, the people are responsible. As is the narrator and the peripheral components here. Our idea of Justice is as spoiled as how we raise these people set to rob people of agency. You can see it coming and the blind eye turns.

It’s a biting, scathing thing that feels only right. We are invited into the horrible parts of some of these peoples’ lives, implicated therein, and the turns of phrase try to make us laugh even as they know it turns our stomachs. Deadly serious and darkly clever in its laughs soaked in derision. Even the narrator has to digress multiple times - a coping mechanism, I assume - expounding on seemingly innocuous things, but often signal out gender dynamics and disallow the reader of any notions that there might be an explanation that makes it all more comfortable.

Never should it be, and certainly it isn’t here. I often had to take breaks from this. That’s how heavy it can be at times. But the prose are just right, as are the themes and the characters. Had we seen the prose refinement of Milk Man, this would have been an easy 5 star read. But it does vascular in it’s handling of the digressions. A few become tiresome and so circuitous to lose the thread. The voice is almost there, here. Make no mistake though, everything here is well worth Burns putting it to paper, and the reader to digest and sit with.

Less contrived than the first one, a more interesting premise, some new characters, and some expansion on what happened previous. I liked it quite a bit. Still has really uneven dialogue though. The author used to be a lawyer and that makes some sense when you look at the dialogue in that way. Everyone feels like the same education level and don’t really have unique cadences or ticks. I feel like that might be a hallmark of commercial fiction, in general though possibly.

Short, sweet, exactly what it says on the tin. I didn’t find too much to find beyond the execution of the premise. It’s neat seeing an elderly character characterized in a different way, but I am not super into comedy either. Not particularly tickled, still more than enough to propel me to the end. Is good.

This has a really, I hesitate to use the word “fun” plot, because it’s, as you might expect, messed up. But it’s always engaging and you’re always trying to extrapolate where this may be going. And you may see the larger strokes, but the granular stuff that happens I don’t think anyone could possibly guess at. And that’s a plus in my book.

What bothers me about it though, is that most of the other elements of writing craft are sacrificed to generate the repeated shocks and twists and thematic through line. Because plotting wise, this is essentially nonsense. Similar to not being able to guess a plot beat, it forms a counter narrative to what is established where the reader has to fill in huge gaps of the plot themselves, asking a lot—probably too much—from the reader. Subjectivity is something I usually like. This feels more like not leaving intentional white space, but not caring at all to bring craft to bear on certain aspects of the book. The plot looses its lustre the more you think about it, as there are a lot of plot holes. Far more than is normal.

I did like what it had to say about sacrificing self to succeed and function in society, especially the intersections of that as pertaining to creating art, specifically. This, paired with just how compelling it was to consume, makes me think it’s worth a read. But it’s hard to imagine how it would exceed my expectations when it pretty much can only communicate what it’s about in a way that keeps you reading, but everything else, craft wise, is lacking.

After finishing this I see now it’s often referred to Alice in Wonderland meets Buffy, and I was thinking it felt exactly like that while reading it. While certainly sophomoric in some elements of craft—primarily worldbuilding, pacing, and diction—I found this to be a pretty solid effort.

What I liked the most about it is the intrusion of reality into the narrative, which surprised me because people say this is an Alice retelling. Which is why I didn’t pick it up until I was sure I didn’t remember much about that story. I’ve not read the classic and my only familiarity is the Disney film, which is now pretty hazy. You’ll notice I can’t speak to how well this maps to the original Alice story at all. I wasn’t expecting that and have no investment on that front.

But I do remember she falls down the hole and is there for some time. In this, Alice has to balance her secret as a person who can fight nightmares with her home-life, primarily her relationship with her mother (the stand out relationship dynamics captured in the book), but also with her friends. I think this recreates the Buffy dynamics and also smartly juxtaposes Alice’s experience in the story I know, with this one. She doesn’t have the luxury of falling into daydreaming and waking up, which could be an effective parallel to marginalized people typically simply not having the same kind of free time, among other things, as the privileged.

This does create some pacing issues. The fantastical element is thrown at you up front, and it’s jarring. Then the down beats and up beats of plot feel like a catch-up game, trying to fill in the reader on the world, while trying to balance the conflicts in play. Some of the terms are a bit cringe as well, such as her inner power enabling her to combat nightmares being called, I think, “muchness”, if I recall correctly. I think this skews toward the younger side of YA, based on setting terms like that.

I think that’s actually a good move, though, even if it’s not how I like the setting, it’s fairly clear this book wasn’t written for me, anyway. I think it’s great that Alice is a character with really strong cultural touchstones but feels completely her own character in her own culture and heritage. For all the ways those touchstones alienate marginalized people, this feels written to include them and make them feel seen.

Southern gothic is an itch that never goes away for me. In many ways it is inherently overwritten, conducive to “too-much description”, but it also typically forces writers in the genre to stylize themselves with my favourite kind of writing. Specificity, musicality, seriousness don’t close to melodrama it’d be funny, if there wasn’t so much nihilism. Almost always it has the secondary characters embody elements, or proponents of concepts that butt heads. There is no winning. Not for anybody. And it is generally masculine to show the toxicity of masculinity. Basically, It’s my cat nip.

A young black boy is found, claiming to be Lucifer fallen, spilling bible verse poetics rather than any kind of straight answers. And there’s murders about. As the odd one out you know the southern hospitality ends at the door for some kinds of folks. It won’t take much for them to come for the boy, and but he ends up finding shelter with our young boy protagonist, in a temporary sanctuary.

In the future we see our boy now grown. A haunted figure bowed with troubles and with no company at all. As the story progresses we bounce back and force as we come to know how and why our man has become truly broken. He too is quite poetic, endowing distance events with a mind that has thought about that summer every minute of everyday. He’s often melodramatic, but pulls it off, because there is a genuine sadness and self loathing coupled with the mystery that give the voice gravitas.

In finding out what happened to his family and what he can’t seem to forgive himself for, the story treads some southern staples. Coming-of-age, mostly. And its intersections. Queerness and racism are predominate, I think, but it casts so large a net, it is also more generally about the human condition and the day-to-day failures to be the person you want to be, and how the unintentional slights have just about as much heft as the more overt things that we call violence. It also struggles very much with faith. Everyone seems to have it but it doesn’t seem to add up to much, despite it being such a quintessential component in the way of life of these people. Really, it’s one of the first ways to form an in-group and an out-group.

And, of course, it’s about not accepting vulnerability and fallibility in other people—especially men—especially if you are a man yourself. Forgiveness and Justice a reckoning in this book. I suppose it’s only fitting that the Morningstar would be present.

While I liked the conclusion of the arc, it’s also somewhat of a rehash of what’s happened in previous volumes too. It’s at its best when it’s not just a physical conflict imo. Panels of punching and stuff, especially with the new artist who is more detailed but also more generic, just feels like a quick read with little actual value. The older ones are very wordy and focus on telling an excellent story. As soon as we learn he is more-or-less invulnerable, it becomes way less interesting and the short stories sing far more than the larger arcs.

The later part with many short stories, ironically, is still uneven though, but this was because each story has a different artist. Some hit and some miss. A vampire story is particularly excellent. The art there was fantastic and it was a bit different than expected. Then, there’s some bland stuff too. Always enjoyable, but does exceed expectations overall.