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Geddy's Moon (2013)

by John Mulhall(Favorite Author)

4.22 of 5 Votes: 1

languge

English

genre

Horror

publisher

Blanket Fort Books

review 1: My husband grew up in a series of small Kansas towns very much like the fictional town of Geddy’s Moon. In one town, there was a nice, elderly man who lived on his street who liked to fix kids’ bicycles for them. The man mostly kept to himself. He had no family. Everyone assumed he was retired. Then he died. His death made local news. It turned out that the man was a multi-millionaire. He left a sizeable endowment to the local Ursuline Academy. All this by way of saying that Mulhall’s repeated and rather tiresome assertion that “there are no secrets in a small town” is utter bullshit. I don’t believe Mulhall has ever spent a day in his life in a small town, much less one in Kansas. (Which, by the way, is not referred to as “the Wheat State.” Yes,... more it’s true that Kansas is considered the bread basket of the country. Yes, there’s a website out there that refers to it as such. But trust me, no one around here calls it that, and it’s not on any sign I’ve ever seen. Its official nickname is the “Sunflower State.”) Having spent my fair share of time in small towns, not only do I disagree that they can’t harbor secrets, but I find it scarier to think that you do not, in fact, have any idea what might be going on right next door. In fact, Mulhall proves that very point when a werewolf comes to town in a 1980s California suburb.Don’t get me wrong. Geddy’s Moon is not a bad book. It is competently written, though it does not have what I would call sparkling prose. Mulhall is frequently repetitive (after the fifth time or so that one of the characters intoned, very ominously, “There are no secrets in small towns,” I was close to turning it into a drinking game. It might’ve made getting those first 100 pages more palatable for me.) I was constantly distracted by Mulhall’s poor attempts at Midwest speech patterns. I was also put off by the cardinal sin so many writers commit -- having the characters call each other by name repeatedly in conversation -- that never ceases to make me gnash my teeth. He also has a slight tendency to tell and not show, and to tell the reader things that we are perfectly capable of figuring out for ourselves. For example, the character Taryn is a single mom. We know this about her. She takes her parenting role very seriously. But he sees fit to underscore it for us by saying, “After all, she was a single mom in a small town. And Jonah was her number-one priority.” Thanks for that sledgehammer to the noggin. I would never have gotten it otherwise. And by the way, does it make a difference, being a single mom in a small town vs. the big city? Anyway. Stephen King’s influence is painfully apparent in these pages, which may or not be a bad thing—in fact, the parts of the book that I find to be the strongest seem to owe the most to It, The Body, The Talisman, and other King stories that feature children protagonists. But then . . . there’s the rest of the book to contend with. Again, it’s not a bad book. But it is a deeply flawed book, and sometimes that’s even more frustrating.Another thing Mulhall and King have in common—Mulhall says he started writing this book when he was 19. King began penning his Dark Tower opus at that age. But Mulhall is not King. Not yet. I would like very much to see a mature work from him.The description of Geddy’s Moon is somewhat misleading. Yes, it starts off with a man named Tyler, who is suffering from amnesia. He’s working in the titular small town as a hired hand on a wheat farm. He begins to remember things. But that’s only the beginning. Tyler remembers that his real name is Joel S. Logan. He is a horror author-- another King conceit, one that was worn out even when King was doing it back in the 80s. (I find writers writing about writers to be incredibly self-indulgent.) He recalls growing up in Fairview Park, California, the summer before he and his best buddies entered high school. The summer of ‘83. I wish I had known going into it that this was a werewolf story. I’m not overly fond of the hairy brutes. I find them to be very limited in terms of character potential, and Mulhall did little to dispel that belief. In this book, there is a good werewolf and a bad werewolf. They are brothers named Seth and Simon, but they might as well be Cain and Abel, Jacob and Esau, perhaps even Goofus and Gallant. Mulhall goes to considerable effort creating a mythos for these two, dating back to the 12th century, which I did not find particularly believable. (Literacy in 12th century England? Doubtful. Studies of Greek mythology? Even more unlikely. Arabian alchemy? Oddly, that was the only thing I didn’t have trouble swallowing.) Seth is Evil with a capital E. He’s a treacherous, murdering, usurping bastard. He’s bad to the bone. Always has been. I don’t find that sort of villain particularly interesting. I like motives, you see. And Seth in the modern-day, terrorizing women and children, spitting playground curse words, just made him that much more tiresome. But you can imagine how just such a person would behave if they have gained the power to turn into a vicious, razor-clawed beast. One thing that the Simon and Seth backstory does not make clear is how they have not managed to find a way to kill each other. Simon alludes to this centuries’ long struggle between the two of them in which they have, occasionally, neutralized each other. But how is it that, after eight or nine hundred years you haven’t come up with a more permanent solution? How is it that no one else has? Supposedly, Seth has been pillaging and terrorizing all this time. Why hasn’t someone taken a rocket launcher to his ass, a la Buffy?This is a common problem with immortal characters—you see it with vamps all the time. When you’ve been around for so long, you have a tendency to get static. And static characters are boring.Which brings me back to the scenes in California from Joel’s youth. The characters and the era really come to life—mainly Joel and his friends, of which, Richard was especially intriguing in a Daryl Dixon sort of way. Parents, siblings, and neighbors put in appearances, but I thought the female characters fell a bit flat. Perhaps werewolves are a metaphor for male rites of passage, but for me, that didn’t excuse the way that Joel’s sister and one of Seth’s female victims (called a “whore”) come off as bimbos, or that Joel’s wife was described as having “remarkably smooth skin” for 34. Because I guess 30 is over-the-hill for women, and we should just expect to become shriveled up old prunes? The parts where the boys confront Seth was absolutely thrilling—though I couldn’t help but think of the scene in It where the Losers confront Pennywise in the abandoned house. And no one but the kids know that this supernatural evil is going on because you never really do know what might going on right next door. Like many King protagonists, a psychic bond is formed—not amongst themselves, but between the boys and Simon, who exists . . . er, somewhere, in some form of astral limbo. In another section of the book, there’s a rather misguided foray into a military subplot in which the US government investigates beasties and unwittingly resurrects Seth. It’s not that I don’t think that the government wouldn’t have such a division, but the fact that it took up such a chunk of the book and didn’t add much had me skipping some pages. Why couldn’t Mulhall just have shown a single scene in which the scientists reassemble Seth’s skeleton and move on? I’m happy to report that the ending indicates that Mulhall is planning some upcoming adventures around Richard, who, I believe, came off as the real hero, both in Joel’s youth and in the story overall. I’d be on board for that, though please, no werewolves.
review 2: Really enjoyable book. The writing is easy to follow and fast paced, and the characters are really well developed. The author has a lot of fun with chronology but it never gets confusing and the story remains engaging and intriguing at all times. For fans of horror, suspense, mystery and the supernatural it's a great read, and anyone vaguely interested in the subjects who enjoy a well told tale would also enjoy Geddy's Moon immensely.The best thing though (without giving too much away) is that the story resolves in a satisfying manner. I've watched so many films and read stories where the setup is fantastic but the big reveal is boring, nonsensical or overly obvious. Not so here. When I finally found out what was really going on I did not feel underwhelmed, it made sense and it did justice to everything that preceded it.Really well written book, especially as it is a debut.Five stars.Rohan Healy less

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