John connolly do it again. From a narrative halfway between terror and black genre, it catches every reader to the point of reading exhaustion.
Facing evil can never come for free. Every hero must face his natural nemesis, the one that stands as a fundamental balancing act so that the evil of the world continues to have a space for celebrity.
In other words, when Jerome put his own life first to save others, he ended up taking the form of the everyday hero. What Jerome could not imagine was that in this struggle between good and evil, the latter has many powerful tools to destroy his opponents.
A real superhero could stand up to his nemesis on equal terms. But Jerome acquired that quality entirely by chance. Evil is very great as an enemy. He succumbs to him, he becomes his puppet and surrenders his soul without the slightest correspondence as soon as evil looms him into the abyss of his defeat.
Jerome became a shadow of himself in the real world, the one through which he passes while his spirit already belongs to hell. His only hope is a breath of humanity that leads him without confidence towards the search for solutions. Charlie Parker then appears as a private investigator trained, by his eccentricity, to extract some light from the situation of a soulless Jerome, humiliated and led towards false accusations of murder in that plane of reality that only supposes the tip of his dark existential iceberg.
Together with Parker, Jerome will approach a kind of cult: The Cut, with special proximity to evil. In the sect the Dead King is worshiped. Perhaps it is that nemesis, the cause of the tragedy of Jerome Burnel.
John Connolly, who already fascinated me with his book of short stories Night music, uses the argument of terror as a scenario capable of harboring the mystery. A hybrid that is close to the noir genre but that disturbs and worries every reader, until it achieves that paradoxical effect of enchantment in reading.
You can now buy the novel Dark times, John Connolly's new book, here: