There is an unquestionable pattern to my reading habits, whereby I usually alternate between the prolific and the up-and-coming – giving awareness to new voices whose novel descriptions act as catalyst to take a novel-length journey. This, the debut novel from Richard Schivar, will pique a reader’s curiosity just enough: here we are presented with Lovecraftian overtones evocative (perhaps) of something fashioned from the early pen - or pseudonyms - of Dean Koontz.
Jaded
police detective Sam Hardin is trying to pick up the pieces of his life after
the untimely death of wife Anna. Now a single father to a teenage girl and
a brain damaged four year old boy, he finds more succor in the bottle and
immersing himself in police work than attending to family. When a series of
bizarre murders at an abandoned warehouse lead to the uncovering of an ancient
ceremonial dagger, Jack is suddenly thrust into the realm of an
ancient God who not only inhabits human form, but has personally marked his son
for possession, thus beginning a new reign of terror and termination of the human species.
A novel
that begins with promise, Shadows of the
Past quickly dovetails into a confusing mish-mash of clichéd
characters and uneven scenes that are never fully realized or resolved. Sam
Hardin is a rogue cop with a giant chip on his shoulder. His depression, regret, and perpetual lamenting apropos of past decisions slowly begin to grate on the
reader, shedding light on a protagonist who isn’t exactly likable and sometimes
hard to believe. His nemesis in this madness, Jack Griffith, stumbles upon the
ancient blade while working the storm-drains ... and it is
here things become more perplexing, culminating in Stephen King’s Pennywise
making an entirely unwelcome cameo. Richard goes on to use the description
‘fathomless black eyes’ roughly two dozen times over the course of two hundred
pages. The final showdown, an epic stand-off between Sam Hardin and Jack
Griffith in the snow, has the distinct flavor of formula – a prescription for
pulp (horror) fiction throughout the eighties and early nineties.
Though puzzling at times, there were enough adequate and redeemable moments in
the novel to show a writer in the early stages of ambition. Schivar has
a flare for prose and – although hardwired to repeat
the same word two (sometimes three) times in a sentence – occasional flashes of skill. Someone who (with time) will eventually find the rhythms of structure
over the extended length of a novel.
