by tony jonesJoin a father’s search for his daughter in sleazy urban fantasy horror monster mash up  The prolific Tim Waggoner returns with “The Mouth of the Dark” a very fast paced fusion of sleazy urban fantasy and supernatural horror. Pulling in at a shortish 200 pages it was a relatively brief read which got off the ground running with a middle-aged man, Jayce Lewis, searching for his twenty-year-old daughter Emory who has been missing for a couple of weeks. Jayce did not have the best relationship with Emory and after leaving some ‘missing’ posters in a shop close to where she worked is confronted by two unpleasant teenagers who pull a knife on him. Jayce is helped by another woman whom he recognises from the shop, she calls the teenagers “dog-eaters” as quite literally that’s what they are. They smell, have sharp teeth and look pretty nasty… Within a few pages things quickly escalate and we realise that there is a supernatural parallel world which is somehow connected to ours called ‘Shadow’ which some humans can see. Those with this ‘gift’ of sight can successfully move between our and the shadow dimension. The woman who helped Jayce, Nicola, sells medicine to doctors and hospitals in modern day America, but also moves freely in Shadow. She agrees to help Jayce, realising that he has the ability to enter this other world and helps him understand it, as he has been suppressing this gift since he was a child. She also suspects his daughter Emory is missing somewhere in Shadow and has probably inherited his ability. The story is set over a brief 48 hours so the opportunity for detailed world-building was pretty limited and I would like to have seen this weird world of Shadow laid out in more detail. Hell, Stephen King or Clive Barker would spend the entire length of this novel setting the scene if this was one of their creations. Instead much of it came across as a bit sketchy and cartoony, indeed, the scene where Jayce enters his first Shadow pub I couldn’t help but think of the famous alien bar scene in Star Wars. Then it is one crisis after another as poor Jayce tries to survive in Shadow, learning new stuff all the way. It’s also very sexualised, repeatedly so, and I tired of this fetish and S&M stuff pretty quickly. Jayce also seems to have a creepy interest in his daughter’s sex-life, which was heightened when he discovers a dangerous supernatural sex toy in her bedroom (a Pink Devil) but don’t even ask what this thing does, you really don’t want to know. On a more human level it does effectively play upon the nightmare of every parent, that of losing a child, heightened by the fact that Jayce no longer truly knows his daughter. Once “The Mouth of the Dark” gets going much of the novel is set in Shadow, but I thought some of the most impressive scenes were the flashbacks to Jayce’s own childhood, his mother, and that of his daughter. When looking back Jayce realises he has missed lots of triggers to Shadow which over the years he either ignored or supressed. Through Jayce’s inner voice he also hears his mother, who comes across as some sort of warning or conscience and this was very well written, especially in the context of how the story strand plays out. Along the way we meet the Harvest Man, Ohio Pig and a very entertaining sequence with Jayce trying to get his hands on a severed head. A lot of the stuff which happens in Shadow is so far over the top it is half-way down the other side, I have no problem with this kind of outlandishness, but when you are bombarded with it, much of it becomes repetitive and it loses its kick. I appreciate it’s strange, wild, crazy and so on, but after a while I was not too bothered whether Jayce was successful in rescuing his daughter or not, as my interest seriously began to wane in the final third of the novel. I have nothing against short and fast paced books, but the world I am reading about, even if it’s crazy has to click, and something about Shadow failed to do that for me. It was drawn too quickly and could have done with more flesh on the bones. Horrible creatures are repeatedly thrown at the reader, thick and fast, but lacked detail. I imagine “The Mouth of the Dark” will get the full spectrum of reviews from 1* haters to 5* masterpieces depending upon personal taste. I probably sit somewhere in the middle, it was too heavy on the sleaze and lacked suspense, but on the other hand was full of wild ideas and assaults the senses in true maximum overdrive style. Tony Jones   BOOK NEWS: A NIGHTINGALE WILL BE SINGING IN MORE THAN BERKELEY SQUARE THIS MONTHComments are closed.
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