Let's talk sequels, shall we?
When I got sent this book, I was told the first one was absolutely amazing and found it attached to the accompanying email. Normally I would have read the first novel before diving into the second, but time limitations prevented me from being able to do so and, for the most part, it was pretty easy to club together an idea of what the first text had been about.
Dead Woman Scorned by Michael Clark could very easily be a standalone text. Slipping between time periods, it talks of a man renovating a house haunted by a murderous ghost who murdered her son, the story of how the murderous ghost came to be, and the actions of a man obsessed with the aforementioned ghost and how her appearances have affected his family. Interwoven with other days of her actions and the occult, it's one of the few texts I have encountered recently where the time-hopping was not only beneficial to my understanding and enjoyment of the text but also incredibly clear.
The only problem I have surrounding the idea of the book being a sequel is how it prepares for what the third text in the series, that I have not and, if I'm honest, have no desire to read. The text could have ended perfectly without the inclusion of a shorter storyline involving the death of the owners of a funeral home in a drunk driving accident, and the subsequent journey her children take towards carrying on working for the company. Eventually leading to the death of their daughter, their fuck-up son has to take over the business and is inexplicably visited by the ghost of his parents when he continues to run his family's business into the ground.
Ground, funeral home, get it? God, I'm a hoot.
Anyway, this part of the text is included incredibly late in the narrative and leads to the novel ending rather abruptly, an attempt to encourage the reader to pick up the next book. Thing is, there was so much going on otherwise that this part felt almost pointless to me, and served no purpose other than to slightly spoil something I'd really enjoyed. The author didn't need to add this part in, it would have fitted perfectly in a book all on its own, and it seemed to me to be an almost underhand way of baiting readers into buying his future work.
The reason this annoyed me was that the text itself is absolutely great, and unlike anything I would normally pick up. I've had mixed feelings towards some of the works I've been sent to review lately. Some of them have been great but others have either been over-the-top, miserable, or just had far too much going on. The main characters are well created and I connected with the protagonist living in the 1970s, who's dealing with the repercussions of a divorce that is leading to his ex-wife preventing him from seeing his children and altogether being a dick about visitation.
I'm a child of separated parents, I get it
In addition to this, it was very easy to tell which time period I was reading about due to the clearly titled chapters and changes in narrative voice and tone. They also linked and flowed together well in a way that I have no seen many texts of a similar style do. If you are into books about the occult, or even if you aren't, I would definitely recommend this text.
xXx
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