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1.0 out of 5 stars
No stars, please, Jan 7 2003
What a godawful book. Probably written during Poppy's lowest phase, this book takes all that was beautiful and terrifying about The Crow and turns it into a pointless gorefest.Correct me if I'm wrong, but for a person to come back from the dead, there must have been a tremendous, horrible wrong in the world that needs to be righted. Now, what happened to out protagonist was tragic, indeed. However, he came back and began mindlessly killing people with little rhyme or reason. His sister-in-law figures out what he is, and, in a bizarre and highly unlikely twist, kills herself so that she, too, can come back. The Afterlife, apparently, has a revolving door. Our "villain," here, is not in any way scary...more like "pathetic and wierd." Thank GOD Poppy's serial killers were better developed in the brilliant Exquisite Corpse. I had a vague annoying nag in the back of my head while reading this, thinking, "Why doesn't someone just hit him over the head with a chair or something?" He was irritating. He didn't know that what he was doing was really, per se, wrong, which takes out a large degree of the "scary, evil man against the Moral Right," which the Crow series is really, when you get down to it, based on. There is one well-developed character in here: the police detective, hiding his sexuality to avoid flak from his coworkers. And yet, he dies pointlessly, and I was left wondering why he was in the book at all. He contributed nothing to the plot, and seemed like nothing more than filler. To anyone out there who wants to read a good Poppy book, I would have to recommend Exquisite Corpse or Drawing Blood. Poppy is one of the few writers whose (very exprensive limited edition) books (and chapbooks) I buy without hesitation. But this...this is a mess.
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