Customer Reviews

Fire and Flesh

5 star:		(3)
4 star:		(1)
3 star:		(1)
2 star:		(0)
1 star:		(2)

 

 

On a steaming hot day in Calcutta, India, a young girl dies. Her father, a local scientist forges a bond with a local pier burner to have her body incinerated. After the deal is completed, and as the man is exiting, a fellow Indain man comes up to him. He tells him that he will make a fantast for him beyond his wildest dreams. The man then turns into a snake like creature and burns the man to stone.

Three months later, during the heat of a Miami summer, a doctor is found dead inside her car with her insides turned to flame. As the days pass, the body count rises. When snake scales are found at one of the crime scenes, Detective Eric and Angelica Hunter find that they are dealing with more than a psycho pyro. It turns out that a serpent god with a power greater than you can ever imagine is rising to take over the world with the help of his host body. And, as Brannon and Hunter later find out, it grows with the feeding of human souls. As the tension grows, so does the action as two law enforcement officers struggle to save the world as we know it.

Full of suspense and action, FIRE AND FLESH is a superior by a new and gifted author. Think the movie, THE MUMMY only with snakes with Detective Richard Jury as Eric Brannon and Medical Examiner Kay Scarpetta as Angelica Hunter. The book is positioned to fly off the shelves and be enjoyed by fans of Koontz and King.

Your mentor, your surrogate father, one of your closest friends has a secret--one big enough to destroy all of humankind. Did you really know him at all? This dilemma threatens to overwhelm a young medical examiner in Miami. In the wake of her mentor's suicide, following a string of strange deaths, Dr. Angelica Hunter is left with an unfathomable mystery, but she must not wait to act. The fate of the world is the hands of Dr. Hunter and Detective Eric Brandon whose job it is to investigate these deaths.

What unfolds from this point is a captivatingly written story of suspense that holds you in its grip until the very end. Pursued by a god/monster who wants nothing more than to incinerate the bodies and souls of everyone in his path, Dr. Hunter and Detective Brandon must find a way to stop him before he reaches full strength. Each page holds a new struggle and demands your full attention. Will the doctor and detective be able to save themselves, much less the world?

Caution: Choose wisely where you decide to read this book. I read the entire second half of the book in one sitting while at my favorite hang out. Mesmerized by the story, I couldn't leave until I had finished.

The title, FIRE & FLESH, does not do justice to this work of incendiary horror. The cover should carry warning labels:
- DANGER: ONCE OPENED,CAN NOT BE CLOSED!
- DO NOT READ THIS IF YOU WANT TO SLEEP TONIGHT!
- WARNING! THIS WILL HAUNT YOU FOR WEEKS!

The story opens in Calcutta, in streets so alive and so viscerally real that one tends to cross over from the imagined world on the page. Few works ever capture me like this.

The story moves to Miami, another place of unrelenting heat. I lived there for seven years and I can still feel the steering wheel of my car sear my hands in the parking lot. Well, from steamy Calcutta to searing Miami, this story burns, burns, burns!

Evan Kingsbury is Robert Walker, the author of the INSTINCT and the EDGE series. A sure hand, he has dipped his pen in the darkest depth of our fears in FIRE & FLESH !

In Fire and Flesh two men walk the earth with a serpent inside of them. Hari Shakir, searches for his other half to meld the two serpents into one. Adib Shakar hides to prevent the meeting from happening. To survive, Hari murders innocent people by elevating their body temperature until they spontaneously combust. He then "eats" the resulting smoke which strengthens his serpent.

Unfortunately I can't tell you what happens the rest of the way because I stopped reading. The plot is interesting to a point but Fire and Flesh is so poorly written I couldn't go on past the halfway point. The author has no ear for dialog. This is some of the worst I've ever read. There is no tension as the plot moves along, its all pretty rote. Many times the next turn in the story is telegraphed so you already know what's going to happen. Scenes that should be fast paced have pages of exposition shoved in between the action which bogs everything down. There are problems that an editor should have fixed like using the same word twice within a sentence which happens numerous times. The subject matter could have made an interesting novel if done by a more skilled writer.

of course it is easy to explain Spontaneous human combustion...there is a monster involved who smokes people as you and I might smoke a cigarette. Sound nasty, painful, frightful? Yeah, it is...but the creature is as engaging and likeable as any snake or villain ever portrayed...in fact he reminds one of the orginal Count Dracula BEFORE the count was watered down by countless, get it, Countless permutations, spoofs, and gags, and films and TV shows that softened the creature. There is nothing SOFT about Walker's portrayal of the monster, which is so refreshing. Anyone who loves horror served up rough and tumble, you will love Fire and Flesh, and you will not want to miss the sequel now on Amazon.com shorts entitled FleshWar...in which the creature is chased back to India and all across India. In the sequel, too, the angry monster sets off to teach mankind a lesson by unleashing a pandemic that makes anything coming before it appear child's play. Loved this book and its sequel so far is smashing.

The story started out with a bang, with really captivating imagery and a truly horrifying, original bad guy.
Unfortunately, the last half of the book, or more, was right out of the cheapie Sci-Fi made for TV movie scripts.
Also, please, I beg you, no more "The fate of the world rests on what we do" comments. Also, how many long speeches can be given when quick timing is so critical to actually saving the world?
If you can handle the frustrating parts of the book, it has some redeeming qualities.

After an evocative opening in Calcutta, the book switches the action to Miami during a massive heatwave. People are spontaneously combusting and B-Movie characters Detective Eric Bannon and Assistant Medical Examiner Angelica Hunter have to stop the evil Hari Shakir from joining with Adib Shakar and forming a super snake god thingy called the Kundalini capable of burning the world.
Yes, it is as stupid as it sounds. Characters are introduced and then flamed 2 pages later. Human characters exhibit stunning amounts of greed and stupidity even when faced with the reality of the Kundalini. There is no development of characters whatsoever. Most of them come and go with stunning rapidity and exist just long enough to utter some of the worst lines of dialogue I've read. You really haven't lived until you experience the ebonics-like dialogue when Shakir attacks a black woman in her apartment. I don't know if it was rascist or not but it surely was poor taste. Once Shakir really gets a head of steam towards the end and starts combusting people at random the novelty has long worn off and has been replaced with a numbed feeling of "Dear God this has to be over soon."
Words actually fail me to describe how incredibly bad this book is. I like horror and I like fantasy, but this is simply horrible. It's boring, non sensical, and trite. If your idea of a quality reading experience is dialogue like "The fate of the world rests in our hands." and "Give it more power, all you've got!" then you may enjoy this.
The introduction of a never before seen or heard of character during the last 5 minutes only reinforces the bad B-movie tendencies this book has. The ending reminded me of "Raiders of the Lost Ark" and the great scene with the Ark being wheeled into a warehouse. Though something a bit similar happens in "Fire and Flesh, it is nowhere near as interesting. Mainly just mind numbingly stupid.
Avoid at all costs. There are better "mindless beach reads" out there then this pulp ....