Gone To See The River Man

I am definitely going to read more Kristopher Triana when I get a chance, even if this turns out to be his best book, he’s worth exploring if you like hard-hitting horror.

This book is a bit meandering and psychedelic in places - remember those scenes in Apocalypse Now when all hell breaks loose, insane machine-gun fire, strobing lights, intense music - it’s a bit like that. What the hell is going on? But it’s also kind of magical, which serves to disarm you.

Even though this is fantastical literature, I have a number of reservations about the overly sharp and copywriting style of prose. Whenever I put the book down and came back to it, the punchy and cut-sentence style was a little hard to get used to before it became fluid again. Maybe that’s just me, because modern marketing requires capturing our attention to stop visitors from skipping pages or closing the app, whereas I prefer literature to be more prosaic.

But I remembered this book and highly recommend it for something a bit out there and totally different. It’s scary.

There's little else to say without giving away spoilers or overly outlining the plot. A woman falls in love with a domineering convict who sends her on crazy-assed missions to prove herself to him, and she falls for it hook, line and sinker. What goes around, comes around, effectively.

It’s a gory and enjoyable experience for horror and disturbing literature fans, but definitely more than just gore for the sake of it, with a detailed and important backstory that comes full circle in a satisfying way.

There are a lot of sick, sad and nasty people in this world. Wise up!