I missed the boat on A Dowry of Blood by S. T. Gibson. By every account I’ve seen, it’s an excellent, gripping, well-written book, and I was offered an arc of it, but I refused because I was busy. More fool me. But I learn from my mistakes, and there are two subsequent novels from the author now out so I thought hey, I’ll get in on that shit, and downloaded Evocation as an audiobook.
This turns out to have been an error.
Before we get onto the substance of the story, I have to say, some of the problem was the audiobook narration. It was Not Good. Sometimes there’s an ineffable connection that’s missing when you’re listening, when a narrator, for whatever reason, just does not vibe with you, and that was definitely true here, especially for the voices the narrator chose for the dialogue. This is not a failing on their part; sometimes we just do not connect, these things happen. But the narrator also kept mispronouncing words and that stressed me out enormously. The first few I chalked up to hey, maybe this is a US/UK pronunciation difference, but it kept on happening, enough that I started googling and… no, it’s not a dialect thing, at least not for most of them (I double checked, and google is adamant that pronouncing “chaise longue” as “chayz lounge” with a hard “ch” is just incorrect). It tended to be on unusual words, either old fashioned ones (there’s a lot of that in the book) or esoteric (I mean, it’s about magical practicioners, so of course), or just… fancier word choices than the immediately obvious synonym that could have gone in its place. Over time, this just became incredibly irritating listening, because I’m incapable of letting stuff go*.
It also did nothing to undermine the vibe I suspect I’d have got even were I reading this with my eyeballs: that someone needed to take away the author’s thesaurus. A few too many synonyms for “said” and “looked”, a few too many overcomplicated sentences that just didn’t sound natural, especially in dialogue. Compound this with a number of those words being mispronounced and it does just sound a bit… amateur? Juvenile? Like a teenager desperately trying to sound erudite and not quite getting the cadences right. Despite everyone involved being in their late twenties. The thing this really reminded me of (derogatory) is Masters of Death by Olivie Blake. I DNFed that one with a quickness because everyone in it was insufferable, and written to say all the long words by someone who clearly did not habitually use the long words themselves, and again, doing so with characters old enough that they definitely ought to know better.
But alas, the issues don’t end there. The story follows three people, David, Rhys and Moira. David and Rhys have a long history and a messy breakup behind them. Rhys and Moira are mostly happily married. David may have sort of accidentally tried to break them up one time but not entirely on purpose. Safe to say, everyone is not the best of buds. But David and Rhys have to play nice, because they’re both involved in the same occult society, and both gunning for the newly available high priest job. Will it go to David, old money, old magic and old connections who can schmooze with the old and young of the society and charm everyone right into his pocket? Or will it go to the upstart Rhys, hard worker, dedicated, learned and hell bent on dragging the society into the 21st century, ending their stagnation and slow decline? And will all of this get messed up by David suddenly being possessed, and having no one to turn to for help but a hostile ex and his entirely-reasonably-ill-disposed wife?
Yes. I mean, obviously. I’ve read books before.
The thing I knew going into this story – which may constitute a spoiler, if you’re more conservatively inclined in that regard, so look away now – is that it’s ultimately a story of a polyamorous relationship. At some point, I knew, even from the start of reading it, David, Rhys and Moira were all going to end up together. So all that heated sniping and crossness at the start was ultimately going to be a smokescreen, and a different relationship was going to emerge from beneath it, or at least sexual tension itself into being around the sniping. And it did… but. But. I kind of – maybe foolishly – assumed there was going to be more of a story around the relationship. Or that we’d progress past the crossness and sniping before like… 2/3 through the book. More fool me I guess?
What this meant is the pacing was wildly unfun. The first part of the book gets very boggy and sticky, with it feeling like the characters are going in circles, making bad choices and having the same conversations with each other over and again, waiting for something to click so their interactions can progress. It’s obviously trying to convey the slow process of Rhys lowering his guard with someone he used to love but no longer trusts, and Moira learning that this dickhead has literally any redeeming qualities (jury’s still out on that in my personal opinion). And I could sort of see that happening, if I squinted. But it’s not done smoothly at all, so the dialogue keeps circling back to the same topics, rehashing the same arguments with incremental changes, and it just gets so dull.
There’s also a significant issue in how those conversations run. Even aside from the clunky vocab rattling around the sides the whole time, the way they speak, particularly how Rhys and Moira speak is… well. I live on the internet. I’m familiar with reddit and twitter and their ways, and the way that the vocab of therapy gets picked up and thrown around and twisted out of shape by overuse. As on r/relationships, so here. There’s a lot of talk about boundaries and trauma and digging into the deep psychological motivations that is entirely alien to my experience of the sort of dialogue people have with their faces in the real world, rather than yelling on twitter, that it felt wildly unnatural and stilted. Maybe there are some people who really do talk like that in person? I have never met them. And again, it was constant, circling back and back and back again to tell David why he was crossing Rhys’ boundaries, why it was to do with his trauma from his childhood, and I just… please. Stop. I beg. A crumb of activity. A morsel of plot or actual character or relationship movement.
When we did get plot? It was fine. It was a perfectly pedestrian oh-no-a-curse-on-my-family-line kind of tale, done adequately enough, but there wasn’t really enough of it to fill a novel, precisely because the novel was way more interested in that three way relationship.
For this to have worked, for that focus to have landed for me, the characters really needed a whole lot more work, for me. David mostly comes across as an arsehole, and it’s really hard to grasp the redeeming qualities he’s supposed to have that make Rhys like him. Rhys meanwhile swings between several very disjointed character states, and his motivations never really make sense. He wants a bunch of different things and then sometimes takes actions almost nonsensically that serve none of those goals. He doesn’t back what he says with his actions, and we don’t get enough interiority from him to get a sense of why he might be being so inconsistent. People don’t have to be logical, but the reader needs to see a little bit of what’s making them tick, to grasp what moves them in the way it does. And then Moira… oh Moira. A black female character, tacked on to whatever the fuck was going on with the two white men, she just occasionally steps in to say something reasonable and make them grow up a bit, and I hate that for her. The threeway relationship that forms ultimately does so around the crux of the two men, despite her being married to one of them, and it feels like it sidelines her quite a bit. There are some interactions between her and David clearly trying to show something growing between them (that is of a very different nature to the sexual chemistry between Rhys and David), but I don’t think there’s enough there to sell it. Add in the fact that she’s having to grapple with both of the men just being absolute numpties half the time, I spent a lot of the book wanting her to ditch the pair of them and run off to another city to be happy. Her relationship with Rhys is a little better, but again it simply does not get the focus that Rhys/David does, and sometimes just lacks the chemistry needed to sell how in love with her, how desperately devoted to her, Rhys is meant to be, based on his own words.
Plaguing all three of them is also the common – annoying – issue that plagues many a book: people really aren’t as good as the author thinks they are at picking up thoughts, emotions and intentions from facial expressions. Even with the people to whom I am closest, with whom I spend all my time, I cannot glean the buckets of info these characters do from a single eyebrow twitch. It was just another thing that felt so implausible, so outside of the norm of human interaction, that the critical human core of the story fell flat.
So alas, I see in this story the shape of something that could have been good and interesting and unusual, but that something really needed a deft hand at character work to do it, and it’s just not there. So much of the story lives in dialogue, in charged moments and meaningful glances, and the spark or realism and humanity simply does not fill those lines. Without that, it is just some slightly annoying people circling the same interpersonal dramas, filling time until someone can be bothered to fix the possession problem. And that’s boring. I probably would have DNFed it had I not needed it to have on while I was crafting, and it has quite possibly soured me on picking up the author again. A massive shame all round.
*Partner discovered not long after we started dating, while playing a board game set in the ancient mediterranean, that he could wind me up no end by talking about the “he-loots” and “pleeeeeebs”, and has continued to do so in the six years since then. It is a known problem.
A Reader of Else 