Customer Reviews

Shifters

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

 

 

I give this four stars for being good at what it is: a horror story with more gore and interpersonal depravity than genuine scariness. Yes, there's good old chills-up-the-spine creepiness, but the impression that sticks is of the sadism and brutality.

Readers who like the splatterpunk horror style will enjoy this. Readers who don't know what the splatterpunk is should probably think long and hard about finding out. Anybody with a normal human sense of empathy should go read some James Herriot or something like that, with kitties and sunshine. There is none of that here.

Yes, there is the patented Lee gore, sex and Hellish qualities, but this book also has a certain sophistication. The writing is much denser and the plot issues are many times philosophically expounded upon. The characters are developed very well. The ending is perfect and thoughtful.

If you like Lee, poetry and philosophy, you will adore this book.

I just can't believe that lee wrote this - I found it kinda of boring, it took me weeks to finish it, not at all like his stuff of header,the big head,or even his shorter stories of the likes of brain cheese buffet or you are my everything. the best part of this book was the last chapter. The book for me had none of the splaterspunk that he is noteably known for and there was no real sex , depravatiy or shocking scenes - sorry but this is just one of those books that did not do it for me like his other stories. I will of course continue to buy his work, but if you are a Lee fan, stay away from this one - BORING !!

I bought the kindle version and I'll admit that I'm only at 15% of the story but so far I am pretty bored with it. Not Lee's usual style at all, very little action. I keep waiting for it to get better, then I give up on it for a while and read something else. I'm not sure if I'll even finish this one.

A lot of people aren't into Edward Lee because his books are usually hit-and-miss. It's a crapshoot as to whether his style works or doesn't, but in MY opinion, this is one of his greater ones. And it's a signed series, I believe, so what's not to love about that, if you're a fan? Buy it, read it, and see what you think about it. If you love Lee like I do, then you're probably going to get it anyway, even if someone says it's horrible.

Another classic from Edward Lee! This was a very interesting and unique book. It contains all the violence, sex, and deviant behavior like any other novel by Mr.Ed, but contains very shopisticated work from John Pelan. Those who choose to read this book will understand what I am talking about.

"SCIFTAN: a proper noun of ultimately unknown origin, taking from the Old Frisian alt. transitive: sciff-to mutate, and tannin-one who. It is a very rare reference indeed, only identified once in the history of modern archaeological discovery . . . namely the subterranean accident which occurred in Gatwick, England in 1971, a water-main rupture. The repair diggings uncovered a well-preserved collection of stemmae from the Archives of the Registry of Publius Aelius Hadrianus, a.k.a.Hadrian, the Emperor of Rome from A.D. 117-38. These archives uniquely elucidated upon the local mythologies exacted from conquered communities before Hadrian terminated Roman Expansionism . . .

"1) DEFINITION OF SEARCH WORD: SCIFTAN: Denotatively, Sciftan, from the early Brythic, pre-Druidic, and original interpretations of the Old Frisian subjunctive verb lists, can be translated into Modern English to this: SHIFTER."

Richard Locke is a poet the likes of which the world rarely sees anymore. He lives off interest from money left to him by his parents, works one day a week in a bookstore, and occasionally fills in as a substitute teacher. He makes "slightly less than enough to get by." Yet when magazines send him payment for the poems they publish--and he seems to get published a lot, "[h]e may even have been an acclaimed poet in some vast local sense"--he sends it back. Because Locke doesn't write poetry for the money, he's an artist and the poems are a part of him, he does this out of love for the work. But lately he hasn't been doing much writing, not since Clare, the woman he was going to propose to, told him she wasn't in love with him anymore. Since then, Locke's doing good to make it through each day. He does so mostly with the help of alcohol and his best friend Richard Lehrling, a popular novelist who usually picks up Locke's tab at the local bar.

Meanwhile, Captain Jack Cordesman (possibly the same Jack Cordesman from an earlier Ed Lee novel, Incubi), has a problem on his hands. There have been a number of murders lately and in some of them the victims appear to have been partially eaten. So far the only evidence linking these murders are red hairs found at the scenes, all coming from a female.

One night Locke is leaving the bar when he's called over to a car by a man he'd only met inside a few hours earlier. The man starts talking to him about transposition, metamorphosis, and how he and Locke are the same. And then the man shoots himself in the head. Captain Cordesman investigates the death and he meets Locke.

"Parity," Cordesman said. "Do you know what parity means?"
Locke eyed him. "It's a connotative noun that means equivalence or resemblance, in status, nature, amounts, things like that."
"Exactly. Similitude, right?"
"Yeah."
"Well, there's a parity here, Mr. Locke, a similitude. There often is when a violent death is involved. And I think you're aware of this parity, but you're not mentioning it for some reason."
"I don't know what the f**k you're talking about, Captain," Locke said.
"Byers was a poet."

He and Locke had something else in common as well. Byers' girlfriend had just left him. The man's death was obviously a suicide, so that should be the end of it. But when the next murder is Locke's best friend Lehrling, the two meet again. The evidence is there, however, and Locke, once again, his simply questioned and let go.

At this point, we're about halfway through the novel and I was beginning to wonder what the whole point was. What's the main thread I'm supposed to be following here? Because Locke was obviously the main character, but there was Cordesman, and then there was the unnamed red-haired woman who's POV we always see in first person italics. She seems to be sort of a spirit who's on the run from someone. We assume it's Lethe, the other character we encounter most often.

Lethe is a mystery for most of the novel. He hires a boat to carry a large crate up the coast for him and when the captain looks inside he sees a large coffin. Then Lethe meets Locke in the bar and offers to pay him $10,000 to write a book for him, something Lethe can have published in a very limited edition, specifically for himself, after which Locke can have the rights and do with it as he pleases. Locke, still struggling with his block, accepts, thinking this is just the thing he needs to get himself back into the groove. After all, he never had a problem writing when he was with Clare, and this new state of mind is one he doesn't know how to handle. He's a poet, he should be WRITING. So he accepts and a few days later travels to Lethe's house, a run down shabby looking dump out in the middle of nowhere. Outside are parked two priceless automobiles, while inside the house Locke gazes around, stunned at the pieces Lethe has collected over the years, including an original Picasso, signed to Lethe from the artist. It's not until this point in the novel where things really begin to kick in and happen, but they seem to happen very fast. Too fast, maybe. With all this build-up we've had, the climax should have been a little more complex, but a good portion of it deals with Locke standing outside the windows of the guest houses on Lethe's estate watching the brutalities going on inside (these scenes go on WAY too long, in my opinion), then there's a drawn-out vision quest or spirit journey or whatever you want to call it Locke goes on. When he comes back, everything else happens, again, way too fast and the climax between the characters is over in a flash (complete with cliched "Nooooooooooo" from the villain when our hero triumphs).

The secret--as we know novels of this type are built on "the secret", also known as backstory. Where does this main character, or this villain, come from? What's his story, what's the spark of his origin that makes all the rest of the novel happen?--is a very good one, original, and I wish I'd thought of it. So I think the basis of the novel is solid. But the structure was a little messy. I mean, just look at how long it took me to summarize the plot. And this book's only 280-some pages. But there's just so much going on, seemingly separate from everything else until in the last quarter of the book it all seems to tie together (SEEMS, there are still some unanswered questions), that it's hard to decide what parts of the plot to include in a summary. There was LOTS of stuff that went on I didn't even come close to covering because I just don't know if it's relevant. Even now, a day after finishing the book, I'm still trying to work out how to straighten out the plot in my head so I can adequately summarize it for this review.

I think the main problem was Cordesman. He's a cool character, and with Ed Lee's background as a cop, the police procedural aspects have a truth the readers believe it completely. But I just don't think Cordesman's character was needed in this story. Sure, with all the murders around, you've got to have the police involved somewhere in there, but not necessarily to the extent Cordesman was involved. For one, there's never a doubt in the reader's mind that Locke is at all responsible, so it's not like the inclusion of police is used as a red herring to throw us off--hell, even after a bar napkin with one of Locke`s poems scribbled on it along with Locke`s fingerprints is found at one of the scenes, Cordesman never considers Locke a suspect. And in the end, Cordesman doesn't arrive in the nick of time to save Locke, so he wasn't needed for heroic value. The only thing Cordesman really contributes to this story is word count, to be honest. Lose him and everything gets a little smoother. Maybe swap out some of Cordesman's word count and add some more about Lethe because that's one backstory that deserved a little more attention.

SHIFTERS was written by Ed Lee and John Pelan. Unfortunately I've not read enough of Pelan's work to comment (although there were passages I read and thought "That must have been Pelan, cuz that don't sound like Lee at all", and I very much want to read more), but I have read PLENTY of Ed Lee over the last few years, probably more than I've read from any other single author aside from King and SHIFTERS is a decent addition to the Ed Lee bibliography. It's not spectacular, but it delivers pretty good, falling right in there with novels like INCUBI and COVEN (both better books, in my opinion, though). It's definitely an older novel as his more recent work, MESSENGER and FLESH GOTHIC for instance, have a slightly different feel than this one, more cohesive, maybe. But for a good time horror read with its fair share of fun time gore and monsters, SHIFTERS has just what you're looking for (better gore than FLESH GOTHIC and a cooler backstory than MESSENGER). Tangled plot aside, SHIFTERS reaffirms one thing in my mind: I really like reading Ed Lee's work.