The Onion AV and Hellnotes

Two great reviews in this week.

The first is from Jason Heller at The Onion AV. Yes, that's right. The Onion.

He says, that Southern Gods is "a sumptuous Southern Gothic thriller steeped in the distinct American mythologies of Cthulhu and the blues."

He goes on to say:

But rather than degenerating into some retro-themed True Blood arc, Southern Gods cannily recycles real-life blues history, from Robert Johnson’s apocryphal deal with the devil to the appropriation of black music by Sun Studio’s Sam Phillips (winkingly re-imagined as Sam Phelps of Helios Studio, employer of the missing promotion man). Jacobs’ view of the blues as a reservoir of arcane power and awe—which was how much of white society did view the blues at the time—is brilliantly conceived and subtly filtered into the plot.

And then he says some other stuff that you don't care about and follows it up with:

What keeps Southern Gods moving is Jacobs’ dark heart and graceful pace. Even when knee-deep in gore, his prose bears a perverse, leisurely politeness, and that down-home drawl renders his quiet moments of tenderness especially poignant. Jacobs’ absorbing passages about music shine brightest, though. Everything from the blues’ ritualistic rhythms to the Stonehenge-like radio antennae dotting the landscape are brought into vivid, poetic focus, even as they’re suffused with ancient weirdness. “You’d think I was going into Transylvania,” Bull quips early in the book, when he’s about to leave his relatively cosmopolitan Memphis for the unknown terrors of rural Arkansas, just across the Mississippi. That joke could also serve as Jacobs’ statement of intent...Southern Gods beautifully probes the eerie, horror-infested underbelly of the South.

And he gives it above average marks. Which is nice. So I've got that going for me.

You can go read the excised bits at The Onion AV Club. But there's no reason to. I've given you all the important stuff.

------

Over at the Hellnotes blog, Sheila Merritt reviews Southern Gods and had some very nice things to say. Some of it went like this:

Sarah is complicated and compelling; passive and dutiful until confronted with insidious evil, it’s as though she blossoms in darkness. The characters, in general, are fascinating. They are easy to visualize courtesy of the author’s attention to detail concerning mannerisms, dress, and demeanor. Their dialogue well conveys the accents and speech patterns of the period, region, and class structure. Yet, the novel’s greatest strength is the way it builds to a shattering climax.

John Hornor Jacobs doesn’t allow the narrative to lapse into predictability in its last chapter. And the epilogue is highly unsettling. Yes, Southern Gods does call upon dark deities popularized by other writers. In composition and tone, however, it creates a malign magic all its own.

Go read her full review HERE.


-----