Well, I'm a sucker for places that are there one moment, gone the next, like the lofty Rue d'Auseil in Lovecraft's "Music of Erich Zann." I'm also fond of deals with the devil, or a devil, as long as I'm not on the signing end of the contract. So I knew I had to read this book.
And I'm glad I did. Not only did I discover a new favorite fictional place, 1303 Shakespeare Street in Baltimore, but a new writer to watch. Damien Walters Grintalis has a lucid style, an ear for dialogue, and an eye for detail that serve her story well. She also seems gifted with that storytelling quality sometimes called profluence - once the hook is sunk, and she sinks it early, the reader is reeled surely, if not always comfortably, through the plot. After all, this is horror, and horror of a particularly unnerving sort. Bad enough when the monsters are out there. Much worse when they're under our own skin. Or, in this case, under Jason Harford's skin.
After his belittling wife leaves him, regular-guy Jason (I'm thinking John Krasinski) decides to assert his new-found independence by getting a tattoo. Cautionary tale: Choose your skin artist with care, and stay far away from a certain John S. Iblis. He inks a magnificent griffin into Jason's arm. The trouble is, the griffin doesn't always stay put. And that routine permission-to-tattoo form that Jason signed? Turns out that impression he had of ornate script shifting under the mundane typeface was more than an impression. The form was a contract, with some very nasty fine print boilerplate; once Jason puts his signature to it, he becomes fair game for the infernal Iblis, or Sailor as Jason thinks of him, after the sea-faring "avatar" in which Iblis first appears to him.
Where the novel excels is in the matter-of-fact accretion of details that create an increasingly dense atmosphere of supernatural malice and inescapable doom. First, there's that weird shift that occurs between 1301 and 1305 Shakespeare Street. Sometimes the door to 1303 is visible and accessible. Sometimes there is no 1303 Shakespeare, just a blank brick wall. Cool. The interior, also mutable, double cool. A passage near the end of the novel, in which a room in 1303 behaves like a stormy sea, its floorboards undulating in waves, is especially impressive. Then there is the escalation in body parts that Jason finds on his doorstep, starting with a cat's tail and ending in certain human relics. The sensitive, from dogs and young children to a minister, feel an aversion to Jason's tattoo. His dreams center more and more on a place of fire and ash and screaming torment. Finally he actually witnesses the griffin's exit from his skin to full-fledged and hungry life, and that exit is neither pretty nor painless. It is, however, extremely vivid.
Jason, who must eventually test his father's contention that he is strong inside, is a very sympathetic character, as is his new girlfriend Mitch. John S. Iblis, aka Sailor, is a formidable antagonist, with some enjoyable POV passages of his own. Jason's father, alive and dead, is a notable minor character, and it's his catchphrase "It is what it is" that will eventually prove the theme of the novel, for good or ill.
My quibbles with the novel are minor. I found some descriptions overlong or repetitive. Some scene sequences appeared with too much regularity (Jason dreams/Jason discovers new evidence of supernatural mayhem; Bad stuff happens/Jason loses consciousness), but that may also be the nature of the beast where this kind of story is concerned. Antagonism between Jason and his ex-wife never really becomes intense enough to justify the apparent consequences. The interaction between Jason and a teenage neighbor also seems a little thin. That girlfriend Mitch also has a griffin tattoo - and an amazing griffin painting done by her dead brother - are details that cry out for more significance than they receive (basically none) and might better be deleted. Descriptions of how things smelled were so frequent that I began to find them an affectation.
Overall, however, a fine scary read with a smart ending, solid writing and lasting resonance. I look forward to DWG's next book!
