[BOOK REVIEW] BRAND NEW DARK: A BISHOP RIDER BOOK BY BEAU JOHNSON

13/9/2021

The retribution is brutal and your imagination will play games with you as you read, but he doesn’t linger or revel in the violence and it never feels gratuitous. That said, it is still unpleasant, so do proceed with caution if you are easily triggered by these subjects

Review by Mark Walker for Ginger Nuts of Horror

Right, let’s get this out the way right at the beginning. I might not have been the best choice to review Brand New Dark or, more accurately, it might not have been my best choice. I haven’t read any of Johnson’s Bishop Rider books so was coming in cold to this review. At first, I wasn’t sure if that was a good idea or not but, in many ways, it gave me a unique perspective into the world of Rider (a very violent, explosive world) coming in without any prior knowledge or preconceptions as I was.
Brand New Dark (I’m going to call it BND from hereon in) comes across like a collection of deleted scenes from a Blu-Ray. Watched in one sitting they are unlikely to tell you the whole story but, put together, they start to paint a picture of the characters and situations you might encounter if you watch the film proper. Or, in this case, read the original Bishop Rider novels.

It took me a while to get into the swing of things with BND as it throws you right into the action. The names, characters, relationships and history were all new to me and I was having to play catch up. However, Johnson’s writing does a great job; it is fluid, easy to read, and descriptive enough to draw you in, without over-egging the pudding, and this is key for what is, essentially, a collection of scenes and vignettes of around 3-5 pages a piece.

Once you are settled in and have worked through three or four stories, even with no prior knowledge, you start to get a feel for who Rider is, what his story is and for his relationships with his buddies and his enemies. Names that start out as a blur of confusion, quickly coalesce into a roster of regulars who, even with just a few pages per story, you get to know, understand and even root for. Considering it is a loose collection of interconnected snapshots, it does a great job of painting a picture of the world these characters inhabit.
And it isn’t a pleasant world.

“Either way, we’re going in hot.”

Rider’s world is violent. Very violent. These stories are not for the fainthearted and I suspect neither are Johnson’s novels. Rider is on a quest to avenge his murdered mother and his raped, tortured and murdered sister. My initial thought was, okay, here we go again. Revenge for rape is a common trope and one I know a lot of people are getting fed up with. The reader learns that this is what is driving Rider very early on and there was a part of me that was worried about what was to come.

However, Johnson handles it well. It will trigger readers and it isn’t a subject most people would relish reading about. But revenge is. And that is where Johnson pulls it off. While we briefly hear about what happened to Rider’s mother and sister, we don’t get any of the details; Johnson saves those for the revenge.

And it comes fast, furious, deadly and extremely bloody. Rider is a man with a particular set of skills (an ex Army medic) and a specific group of friends who you wouldn’t want to find yourself on the wrong side of. Initially setting out to seek revenge for his mother and sister, Rider and his posse end up on a crusade to rid the world of deviants, perverts, molesters and traffickers. They hunt the lowlife ‘shitbirds’ of the backstreets and underworld; filth that really does need to be washed off of the streets.

Johnson doesn’t shy away from telling you what these guys are doing, but he also doesn’t go too far. The retribution is brutal and your imagination will play games with you as you read, but he doesn’t linger or revel in the violence and it never feels gratuitous. That said, it is still unpleasant, so do proceed with caution if you are easily triggered by these subjects and, after an afternoon of reading 25 mini-revenge stories, I did feel a little saturated.

Johnson doesn’t just play it for effect though, and the shorts do start to build up a picture of Rider that draws the reader in, perhaps more so if you are not familiar with him, as I wasn’t. It’s almost like watching Man Bites Dog as you realise you have been drawn into the world of a killer and have become a voyeur and observer cheering on the demise of shitbird after shirtbird. Although these are scumbags of the lowest order who deserve to be punished, even Rider questions what he is doing and whether it is right, but he recognises he has gone too far to stop.

“What we do, what we’ve done, it’s not a perfect solution.”

If anything, it can get a bit repetitive. The stories follow a similar pattern; a pattern of kidnapping a victim and taking them back to a safehouse kill room before dismantling them with a variety of unpleasant tools, Rider often using his skills as a medic to prolong the victims life and torture. Some readers may get fatigued by this, but the very nature of the book allows you read in bite-sized chunks, so you can dip in and out as you please. The 25 stories do, however, include a handful of monologues from a character preparing victims for Rider which shake things up a bit and provide a moment of almost light relief from the relentless rampage of revenge.

But only almost.

Ultimately BND plays out as a collection of off-cuts, missing tales to help fill the gaps in the Bishop Rider story. Some of it may not make sense if you haven’t read any of the original novels and, while I would perhaps recommend doing so before reading BND, reading it without that prior knowledge is not a particular disadvantage. In fact, while not sure what I was going to make of BND before I started it, by the end of the book, I had a fair understanding of Rider and his motivations, and I found myself contemplating the novels. I was drawn in by the characters and found myself wanting to know more. BND serves as a taster, an aperitif to get you in the mood for Rider proper.

It is violent and unpleasant in places (actually quite a lot of places) referring to subject matter that will be triggering for many, but Johnson doesn’t linger on the really unpleasant stuff and doesn’t dwell on the catalysts for Rider’s anger, instead it concentrates on the fates of those that deserve the retribution.
If you enjoy violent revenge, then you will enjoy Brand New Dark.

PS – Obviously the novels will allow more space for Johnson and Rider to do their thing. Having not read them, I cannot comment on how triggering they may be or whether the acts that Rider is seeking revenge for are more graphically described than in BND. If this tempts you to explore the world of Rider in more detail, I would simply suggest you proceed with caution.

Brand New Dark – A Bishop Rider Book
by Beau Johnson (2021)

Bishop Rider Lives! And for a dead man, he’s been busy. His story and the parts of it yet to be told being what populates Brand New Dark. Unseen moments pulled from between the pages of A Better Kind of Hate, The Big Machine Eats, and All of Them to Burn. Twenty-five new tales that bridge what came before and expand upon what can only come after.

Come, see what happened in-between.

Come, see how he made them burn.