Dawn Song [Hardcover]

Michael Marano (Author)

Book Description

Publication Date: April 15, 1998

Dawn Song is a darkly erotic exploration of supernatural evil in very human circumstances. Lawrence is an invisible bookstore clerk in Boston, drawn through no choice of his own into the greatest conflict of all--a struggle for dominance between two of the most powerful devils in Hell.

As the media frenzy of the Gulf War buildup enthralls the city, Lawrence feels the presence of something ethereal and beautiful that has come to Boston, as he has, in search of fulfillment and love everlasting. If he only knew what it was...

Editorial Reviews

Amazon.com Review

"The Succubus was newly born, nurtured by the loving care of a horned prince from the pummeled soul of a camp-following whore (who had, in fleshy life, serviced one of Napoleon's best officers). With skilled hand and eye, like a master jeweler, he fashioned his child from this twisted spirit, purifying and distilling her ... burning and sculpting this ghost of a once human thing into a crimson-skinned siren--her form holding the secret fire of cinnabar and the muted light of a November sunset."

According to Michael Marano, there are two great powers in the depths of Hell. Belial, the Unbowed One, is the horned prince who treasures beauty--the beauty of individual human souls, the beauty of a future when all is "despair and the terror of the omnipresent sublime." Leviathan, the Enfolded One, is an enormous armored worm, a blind idiot whose only purpose is the perpetuation of ugliness--the banality of evil, human souls entrapped in a gross, undifferentiated mass. The battle between these two comes to a head in Boston, at the end of 1990, the dawn of the Gulf War. The combatants are a newborn succubus and a handful of benighted human beings. The backdrop is the darkness of the River Charles, the lavender-gray of the winter sky, and the millions of lonely voices of the city.

Dawn Song is an ambitious first novel, enriched by the author's grad school background in medieval history, alchemy, and the kabbalah. Marano's measured, often lyrical prose uses a host of gritty details to evoke the desperation of a handful of Bostonians--their unique, yet sadly predictable, plights, and their multilayered inner worlds. The complex plot is skillfully woven together around the themes of evil-as-beauty vs. evil-as-ugliness. The book's only flaw is that the ending is rather muddled, but you'll have been treated to so many poignant moments and amazing horrors by the time you get there, you'll hardly mind. --Fiona Webster

From Publishers Weekly

Opposing powers in Hell use human surrogates to duke out their differences in this ambitious but ponderously overwritten dark fantasy debut. The immortal adversaries in Marano's occult cosmos are Belial, the Unbowed One, whose earthly emissary is a sexually voracious succubus named Jeannette, and Leviathan, the Enfolded One, who embodies what "the world knows as patriotism, bold enterprise, religious fervor, and righteous indignation." The mortal puppets whose strings they pull include sensitive gay bookstore clerk Lawrence, Harvard Divinity School student Ed Sloane (Lawrence's unrequited love interest) and a motley assortment of hangers-on to the Boston academic community. Set in 1990, at the height of the Gulf War, the novel attempts to delineate kabbalistic forces that shape the turmoil of individual lives and global dramas. But Marano's dark divinities, whose thoughts manifest in eccentrically typeset passages, are inscrutable to mere mortal readers. His human characters are not much clearer: mired in angst over the flaws that make them vulnerable to infernal influences, they can barely cross a room without collapsing into heaps of self-reflection. Marano compounds these drags on his narrative's momentum with an assault of awkward analogies and metaphors ("The mental images that strung his ideas into a cogent thesis were consigned to a particular hall of his memory palace. The mnemonic devices were displayed as suits of armor would be in the hall of a museum"). Despite its vividly imagined tableau of the world as a cosmic combat zone and average Americans as celestial soldiers, this novel is disappointingly devoid of the awe and mystery it strains so mightily to evoke.
Copyright 1998 Reed Business Information, Inc.

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Product Details

• Hardcover: 384 pages
• Publisher: Tor Books; 1st edition (April 15, 1998)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0312864329
• ISBN-13: 978-0312864323
• Product Dimensions: 8.4 x 5.7 x 1.5 inches
• Shipping Weight: 1.4 pounds
• Average Customer Review: 3.6 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (26 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #2,311,891 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

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Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

9 of 9 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Dawn Song is a scary, sexy, demonic, dreadfully good read!, July 12, 1998

By 

Lorelei Shannon "CadillacGal" (Issaquah, Washington) - See all my reviews
(REAL NAME)   

This review is from: Dawn Song (Hardcover)

You're going to hear a lot about Michael Marano's debut novel, Dawn Song. You're going to read all about how literary it is, how intelligent, how beautifully written, how subtle and scholarly. Okay, all that's true, but I'm here to tell you how hard it kicks butt.

This book rocks. It's gripping, fascinating, bizarre, and most of all, scary. Set in Boston in the bitter winter of 1990, Dawn Song is the story of a desperate battle between two major princes of Hell. Both want supremacy over the Earth; Belial, the Unbowed One, seeks to obtain souls through eloquent entrapments and sensual conquests of human weakness, while Leviathan, the Enfolded One, just wants to infect the world with brainless violence. The Unbowed One sends a beautiful succubus to the Earth to carry out his will and spread his influence, which she does with innocently evil gusto. Many humans become entangled in her web of sex and soul-devouring death, including Lawrence, a naïve young gay man, and Ed, a brilliant, troubled professor of theology. When the nightmarish Enfolded One (who has basically caused the Gulf War by rolling over in his sleep) gets wind of the succubus's many horrific accomplishments, he reaches out into the human world, possesses a hapless teacher, and the brimstone really hits the fan.

Dawn Song has all the good stuff. Sex, violence, beauty, madness, terror, paranoia, love, hate, hope and despair. Rest assured, you'll be taken on an emotional roller coaster as soon as you crack the cover. And you'll be scared. Will you ever. One of the most horrifying aspects of the whole story is the fact that (although you find yourself rooting for the sensual Unbowed One) no matter which one of the demonic lords may win in the end, we, the human race, are hosed. It's like the difference between being eaten by Hannibal Lecter or Leatherface. One may serve you up on a silver platter with a glass of Chianti, the other on a TV tray with a bottle of Yoo Hoo, but either way, you still end up et. It's not a ple! asant thought, and it gives the book a creeping aura of menace that sets the reader on constant edge.

So check it out. Dawn Song will stretch your brain in directions you've never dreamed about. Just don't plan to sleep well for awhile.

4 of 4 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars A triumphant first novel, July 6, 1998

By A Customer

This review is from: Dawn Song (Hardcover)

Dawn Song is a brilliant debut, superbly written, intelligently plotted, and skillfullly peopled with a most intriguing array of characters. It's chilling, and inspires such abject awe.... A magnificent tale of dark magick and human interrelations.

3 of 3 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars What a great book, June 23, 1998

By 

[e-mail] (Boston) - See all my reviews

This review is from: Dawn Song (Hardcover)

It is frightening how good this book is. For a first book this has got to be one of the strongest releases ever. Michael Marano does a wonderful job of capturing the snobbish and desperate attitude of the typical Bostonian. His approach to demonology and the landscape of Hell is fresh and believable. There are a lot of characters to keep track of but they each have a unique personality which makes them all quite memorable. A fine book. I can't wait to see what he does next.