Amy Langevin

Zylen LaRocque, a twenty-eight-year-old depressive, arranges to be taken by Death, but his suicide fails, and he ends up proposing to the supernatural entity instead.Death accepts Zylen's heart and takes up partial residence in his being, which allows Death to affect the tangible realm at whim. Manipulated like a puppet, Zylen becomes entangled in Death's countless affairs and finds himself continuously washing blood off his hands as his life, and everyone in it, descends into a whirlwind of mania and slaughter.

The Man Who Married Death

Ethan E. Harris

I started reading page one. And within 30 words, set the book down. And, when that happens, I wondered why I'd had that reaction. It looks like poetry. It doesn't have the rhythm, but it has the style. A conflict started within revolving around, "Can I read what looks like poetry?" and "Am I being an idiot for not reading something that looks like poetry?" and "Is this poetry?" and "Is this a romance novel masquerading as darkness?" 

I reread the book's blurb. I confirmed that this was a single story, having noticed numbering throughout the story. The description hinted at an entangled relationship with death *might* pointing to a romance (which does nothing for me). 

And after all these assumptions, I picked it up again. I read history and things dark. And then I was swept into the story. All I had to do was push aside my assumptions and enjoy the trip. The first chapter chilled me with the visually terrifying and beautiful scene in the snow.

This story is dark. The text is set off as poetic. Yet, readers should know that the journey is dark. And it's also dark. And I so thoroughly enjoyed everything about Amy Langevin's book. So, so much. In my mind, I deleted the carriage returns as I read. Oh, this was such a beautiful, wonderfully worded tale of terror. This is Poe, not Stephen King. (It's annoying to me when horror books come out appealing to Stephen King.)

I had fleeting thoughts while reading that some authors strain to make "big sounding words" fit in their books or their speech and it fails. And each time I hit a more complexly worded, imaginatively reflective sentence, I thought, "Oh, this is going to be it. This is where the author makes it sound like a pre-schooler talking about dark matter [the science topic]." Strong, big words that don't match the feel of the narrative. It never happened. Each time I had this thought, I stopped at the end of the phrase and was delighted to realize that indeed, the sentence wouldn't have worked any other way. In short, it worked nicely.

I was stunned when I read through the scene at the waterfall. I had been enjoying the metaphysical interaction between the story and me so far, but nothing prepared me for the O-S moment I had passing through this point. There is no way to give the reader a feel for what is going to happen to them when reading this, but if you enjoy this kind of dark matter, this passage will feed that hunger.

I don't know the author. I've never read anything by them. And even when I do post a review, I always try to include a negative, or maybe something that broke at some point, to highlight that I'm not a fanboy. Again, I don't know the author, and I have no horse in the race. 

I recommend this to anyone who would like to avoid the jump scare and the haunted house tale, but still wants something to give them the O-S moment. I hope I've represented "The Man Who Married Death" well. And I hope you read it.

There is beauty here in this darkness.

The Man Who Married Death

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