4 out of 4 stars
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Becoming by David A. Bradbury is a horror novel, with just a little bit of science fiction mixed in. It is set in the near future. All that really indicates ‘the near future’ is the monetary system is now ‘credits’ instead of pounds, the overabundance of different kinds of tablets, and the chapters are ‘datalogs’. It’s, weird. Not the bad kind of weird, mostly just intellectually weird, and a bit difficult to read if you’re looking for something casual to enjoy. It’s complex.
The book is about a man named William Kerry and his girlfriend Isabelle Butler. At the start of the book we are thrust into a rather graphic and horrifying nightmare of William’s. William has been noticed by an eldritch abomination (a godlike entity beyond human understanding, made popular by H.P. Lovecraft), or a demon, known only as the Overseer The Overseer is using William to create a conduit between its horrifying world and ours. The story is a complex telling of William’s nightmares and hallucinations as the Overseer attempts to use him as a bridge to our world. Eventually these hallucinations spill out into the real world and threaten the people around William, including his girlfriend.
Now, when I say this book is complex, I am mostly referring to the writing style. Many new authors have what I call the ‘Tell Don’t Show’ problem. They will tell us that something is horrifying and terrible, or tell us of a quality that their characters have, but very rarely do they show it. This book has the opposite going for it. It is very descriptive, and very verbose. This means it sets the mood rather well. When the dark entity known as the Shadowman, a servant of the Overseer, starts to stalk and manipulate the characters in the hospital I can feel some of their terror. This is great, and I love it. Unfortunately in making the book nice and descriptive this also means that casual readers might become lost in the concepts. The book often goes on psychological tangents. According to the author’s biography he has a PhD in Psychology and it shows. While I did love the challenge of reading this book, I know that many people just won’t get it, and may become a bit frustrated.
There is a lot in this book to love. According to his bio the author is a fan of such greats as Stephen King and Clive Barker. You can see it in the text, as a great deal of the horror comes from what is known as body horror. Body horror is a subsection of horror that deals with the body transforming in gruesome and horrifying ways. Movies like the 1980’s version of The Thing and Re-Animator are good examples. True to form the book is laden with gross and horrible things that happen both in the real world and in the character’s minds. At one point a neurosurgeon is influenced by the Shadowman and ends up eating parts of a guard. If you are a fan of this kind of horror this is defiantly the book for you.
I give Becoming a 4 out of 4, as it’s been a while since I read a book like this one. Now, again I would not recommend this to a young reader, or a reader who just wants something that won’t challenge them. However, for those who like this brand of horror Becoming is likely to be a real treat.
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Becoming
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