And now I return to my friend's second novel, the long-awaited (by me, at least) Order of the Skull. Again, there's a strange split in the chapter that I myself wouldn't have used, preferring a little more closure in between chapters. One character ends up getting hit in the head with a hammer, hard, then manages to carry on a quite normal, if strained, conversation with the characters. And my impression that it was a pretty solid blow too.
That surprises me. I expected this guy to have been incapacitated by the blow. Granted, I'm not any kind of expert in trauma (in fact, the only time I've ever had to go to the hospital is when I was born), although not for lack of trying. Sadly, whenever I ask injury-related questions to the nurses, doctors, and paramedics I know, they just look at me like I'm deranged. Alas. So I was surprised that the poor victim manages to spit out his lines without hindrance.
Then we have an interesting little exorcism scene...sadly, my first thought was "Shouldn't they be speaking Latin?" Pre-Vatican II? During an exorcism? Also, I'm not sure that a nun would have attempted an exorcism herself, although we later find that she was always interested in the occult (how convenient).It seems as though one of the characters is, in fact, possessed; between that and the undead, this is pretty clearly more like Indiana Jones than Man of Bronze (just for the record: Indiana Jones is way better).
And for a woman of faith, Sister Cecilia comes off looking pretty weak; when the demon starts mocking the Bible, she replies that "It's all we have." If I was dedicated my life to God, I'd like to think I could muster up a better reply than that. She gets a cool moment later lobbing some holy water, then after striking that decisive blow she decides to freeze and panic. ?
During the exorcism, the demon dumps some plot, then another action scene pops up. It starts off kind of poor, but gunfights in a church are always fun. I'm a little disappointed in how easily one guy went down, though; if this were a video game, I'd predict he'd be back with a vengeance in a few hours.
Also, disappointingly, Tabor references Roman magic. Roman. When I think of ancient civilizations with magical traditions, the Romans aren't exactly the people who come to mind. In fact, they're probably the last. Aleister Crowley and the Order of the Golden Dawn didn't exactly draw on the mystical traditions of Rome, did they? No one worries about Roman curses either. To be fair, we've had this argument before, and Tabor is still obsessed with all things Roman. He's still wrong though. :)
Some interesting things happen in this chapter, but this part of the book feels like it needs a little more work. Here's where things become overtly supernatural, full of demons and magic. And we learn that the bad guy wants Geronimo's skull as part of a hazing ritual, which made me laugh out loud (that's not actually true, but one of the characters does suggest it).
We learn a little bit more about the characters; evidently Emily Carson has cracked open a few tombs in her day. But there's even more questions. It seemed that the antagonist, Reinfeld, chasing them has fully merged with a demon, whereas Eigenstulf the master villain only seeks to accomplish that. So then why is Reinfeld chasing down some loser small-fry while Eingestulf does whatever with the skull? Shouldn't he be telling Eigenstulf to handle his own goddamn problems?
I'm not saying there's not answers to these, but they are certainly questions I'm thinking about as I'm reading.
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