Book Review: Every Dead Thing

The Travelling Man is on the move,

Few will survive the journey.

Charlie Parker is a man fuelled by revenge. A revenge so strong and powerful that it consumes his very being. The cause of his need for violence is The Travelling Man, an enigmatic, demonic man who has taken his wife and child, blinding them and peeling off their faces. This book is a modern Dante's Inferno, following one mans descent into Hell.

The protagonist, Parker, is a private detective, known for his violence and ability to get the job done, but he is a man with a dark past. His wife and daughter where brutally murdered while he was drunk at a bar, and now is a broken man. Until the day where he is drawn in to investigate the disappearance of a young woman, and the mysterious killer begins to kill again, and Parker is thrown back into a world of grief, pain, and suffering. 

As a general rule, I'm not big into detective fiction. Maybe a bit of Conan Doyle, but not a lot else seems to interest me there. Until one day, I picked up a copy of the fifth book in the Charlie Parker series, The Black Angel (also to be reviewed later), and I was hooked. Here was a beautifully crafted story, so brilliantly written, and nigh poetic in it's structure that I fell into it's smothering embrace.

John Connolly, the author of the series, paints a world that at first glance is peaceful and idyllic, but as soon as you turn a corner, bang! The world becomes a dark and dreary thing, populated by criminals, killers, and horrific deeds.

This book, being the first of the series, is also one of the best, with it's gritty labyrinthine narrative,  believable characters and flowing structure.

The author does a fantastic job of making his characters human, but at the same time, making some of his more vicious characters less human, more like supernatural entities driven by some dark power, and all somehow connected, each of these man-monsters all seem to be dragging the world around them into the darkness, maybe pushing others into the darkness of their being, or the darkness of their graves, from which there is no escape. 

And he makes one point clear throughout his books.

Here be monsters.