Vessels is the third book chronicling the life of Timmy Quinn, a man who can communicate (sorta? maybe?) with murder victims.
In the opening of the novel, you are told the story behind the plot twist at the end of the Turtle Boy and then move on to an adult Quinn, who is a reserved jerk trying to get away from spirits by escaping to a small Irish Island. Of course this doesn’t go as planned, and his love interest from the previous books show up and there’s a mystery and.. yeah.
I really don’t like this installment. I can’t say I hate it, because I don’t hate it, but it really disappointed me. I didn’t like Quinn at all, I felt like his girlfriend was used as a plot device as she seems to be the only person he cares about? There was also the whole “Snape”character, where a character is set up as someone to hate, but he turns out to be a good guy in the end?
I don’t know, it felt cheap, I felt cheated. The major genre into play here was supernatural, a genre I usually really enjoy (when it’s combined with horror) but this was a case where I felt the supernatural elements really did not work well. The backstory that talked about the “curtains” and “otherworld” also did not really make sense to me and just seemed like a bunch of random words together that had no meaning. This book also seemed to have a lot of connections to Christianity and (I think) Catholicism, which, again, is something I usually really enjoy, but it did nothing for me. To be fair, as fascinating as I find catholic-inspired works, I know very little about the religion, so that may have hindered my experience, but I don’t think that was it. I also felt like women tend to often be at the end of the violence in a lot of these stories, and if it isn’t women, it’s children. Given the lack of women featured in this story and lack of character depth given to these characters, It’s a little unfortunate. I don’t think there were many female characters on this island, and if there was, they were likely a wife with no personality or a deceased women that a man was crying over.
Again, as bitter as this review is, I still don’t hate this book. It just does not stand up in any way to the rest of the books in this series, which hold a strong place in my heart. If this makes you not want to read this book, trust me, it gets better. This one is the weakest one, but there are two more after this one that are AMAZING. This is a great horror series, and one that I think too many people are missing out on.
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