![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
A Matter of Blood book ramble
I hesitate to call this a review, because even in the version in my head there’s a lot of tangents. And it’s not quite a rec (for reasons which will become obvious). So I’m calling it a ramble.
Crishna brought this book down to Cornwall for me, and seeing as it was a) crime b) with a supernatural bent and c) set in London, I had to read it.
A Matter of Blood is the first book in the Dog-Faced Gods trilogy (which I nearly just typed as God-Faced Dogs, which would be something else entirely), set in a very near future where the global financial crisis was far more serious than the real one, and most of the world is now in hock to The Bank, a shady organisation.
The book follows Detective Inspector Cass Jones over two investigations, the shooting of two schoolboys and a serial killer who calls himself the Man of Flies and who likes leaving the words Nothing Is Sacred written in blood on his victims.
At the same time, his marriage is going down the pan (although the rot set in long before the start of the book, after an undercover operation that went very bad – we find out just how bad in flashbacks).
Ok, so that’s the setup, now we get into the spoilery discussion:
I described this book to someone as ‘for people who think Luther is too cheerful’, and it really is an incredibly depressing tale. There were at least two occasions where I wanted to put down the book and walk away, but it was so compellingly written I carried on. Having now finished it, I’m not entirely sure I’m happy with my decision.
The book posits that because the UK government is broke, everything is awful and police end up being paid by results, which in turn means it’s all gone back to the bad old days where criminals pay the police to avoid arresting certain people, so basically every single cop is on the take.
It’s not written in first person (tbf it’s not really urban fantasy but I have read a lot of that recently, so it felt like the kind of thing that would usually be first person), which is really a relief. I’m not sure I could stand getting any closer to Cass Jones (he is a very, very tortured but nonetheless excellent detective). He’s the micro representation of the macro-scale problems in this society. He’s self-loathing, barely hanging on, but still struggling to keep going.
Cass has a troublesome relationship with his brother, who he seems to view mostly as a nuisance. Unfortunately, when his brother phones up sounding weird, this means Cass avoids calling him back, and then his brother kills his wife and child before turning the gun on himself.
This, by the way, is early on in the book, and things get much, much worse.
There are supernatural elements in the book which contribute to the overall awfulness as well (it’s generally categorised as a thriller but I have to say I’d class it as horror). Shortly after his brother dies, Cass starts seeing visions of his brother, and the Man of Flies really can control flies (I’m not going to describe any of that stuff; it was bad enough reading about it). There’s also some supernatural stuff going on with the people behind the bank (Mr Bright and Mr Solomon) who have been around for years without aging. There’s also something called The Glow which is some kind of aura thing that Cass (among others) can see, although he spends most of the book in denial about it.
The overwhelming sense of this book is that things are bleak, bleak, bleak. The resolution to one of Cass’ cases is one of the single most upsetting things I’ve ever read in fiction. The state of the nation is bleak. The police are all at least a little bit corrupt. Cass’ home life is desperately bad. EVERYTHING IS HORRIBLE.
And yet. It’s really well-written. There was some suspension of disbelief involved with the way society had gone, for me, but mostly I think that was a question of how quickly everything had gone to shit (I have this problem with a lot of near-future dystopias so it’s not just a problem with this book), and how willing pretty much everyone seemed to be to go along with that. Maybe I’m naïve but I’d like to think that people aren’t just waiting for an excuse to be horrible.
Apart from that, it was so compelling that I couldn’t stop. I tried, but once I had started it and had got involved in the story, I was too interested to let go. I wanted Cass to solve the murders, I wanted to know what was going on with the Glow (something which I did not find out entirely, because this is a trilogy), really I wanted to get to the end so I could get some resolution and not let the book keep bugging me (hahaha, oh GOD pun so not intended, I was trying to make a comment about the book getting under my skin and not think about the flies).
One of the disappointing things for me was how, although the book was set in London, it didn’t really feel like that was necessary. It was set in London because that’s the financial centres are, and, weirdly, where the MI6 hq are (The Bank took over the MI6 hq as their hq, in a subplot I admit did not really work out for me). It just didn’t feel like it was set in London, or that the characters were Londoners. Perhaps I’ve just been spoilt by the Peter Grant and Matthew Swift books.
Like I said above, this isn’t quite a rec. This book is really hard going, and I’m sure the rest of the series will be just as harsh (I’ve decided not to read it). However, if you’ve got a higher tolerance than me for insects/horror/horrible deaths and you like interesting plots and dystopic futures, this trilogy is worth a shot.
Tl; dr - in reading this book I found out my limit for depressing shit is, actually, Luther. Good to know.
Crishna brought this book down to Cornwall for me, and seeing as it was a) crime b) with a supernatural bent and c) set in London, I had to read it.
A Matter of Blood is the first book in the Dog-Faced Gods trilogy (which I nearly just typed as God-Faced Dogs, which would be something else entirely), set in a very near future where the global financial crisis was far more serious than the real one, and most of the world is now in hock to The Bank, a shady organisation.
The book follows Detective Inspector Cass Jones over two investigations, the shooting of two schoolboys and a serial killer who calls himself the Man of Flies and who likes leaving the words Nothing Is Sacred written in blood on his victims.
At the same time, his marriage is going down the pan (although the rot set in long before the start of the book, after an undercover operation that went very bad – we find out just how bad in flashbacks).
Ok, so that’s the setup, now we get into the spoilery discussion:
I described this book to someone as ‘for people who think Luther is too cheerful’, and it really is an incredibly depressing tale. There were at least two occasions where I wanted to put down the book and walk away, but it was so compellingly written I carried on. Having now finished it, I’m not entirely sure I’m happy with my decision.
The book posits that because the UK government is broke, everything is awful and police end up being paid by results, which in turn means it’s all gone back to the bad old days where criminals pay the police to avoid arresting certain people, so basically every single cop is on the take.
It’s not written in first person (tbf it’s not really urban fantasy but I have read a lot of that recently, so it felt like the kind of thing that would usually be first person), which is really a relief. I’m not sure I could stand getting any closer to Cass Jones (he is a very, very tortured but nonetheless excellent detective). He’s the micro representation of the macro-scale problems in this society. He’s self-loathing, barely hanging on, but still struggling to keep going.
Cass has a troublesome relationship with his brother, who he seems to view mostly as a nuisance. Unfortunately, when his brother phones up sounding weird, this means Cass avoids calling him back, and then his brother kills his wife and child before turning the gun on himself.
This, by the way, is early on in the book, and things get much, much worse.
There are supernatural elements in the book which contribute to the overall awfulness as well (it’s generally categorised as a thriller but I have to say I’d class it as horror). Shortly after his brother dies, Cass starts seeing visions of his brother, and the Man of Flies really can control flies (I’m not going to describe any of that stuff; it was bad enough reading about it). There’s also some supernatural stuff going on with the people behind the bank (Mr Bright and Mr Solomon) who have been around for years without aging. There’s also something called The Glow which is some kind of aura thing that Cass (among others) can see, although he spends most of the book in denial about it.
The overwhelming sense of this book is that things are bleak, bleak, bleak. The resolution to one of Cass’ cases is one of the single most upsetting things I’ve ever read in fiction. The state of the nation is bleak. The police are all at least a little bit corrupt. Cass’ home life is desperately bad. EVERYTHING IS HORRIBLE.
And yet. It’s really well-written. There was some suspension of disbelief involved with the way society had gone, for me, but mostly I think that was a question of how quickly everything had gone to shit (I have this problem with a lot of near-future dystopias so it’s not just a problem with this book), and how willing pretty much everyone seemed to be to go along with that. Maybe I’m naïve but I’d like to think that people aren’t just waiting for an excuse to be horrible.
Apart from that, it was so compelling that I couldn’t stop. I tried, but once I had started it and had got involved in the story, I was too interested to let go. I wanted Cass to solve the murders, I wanted to know what was going on with the Glow (something which I did not find out entirely, because this is a trilogy), really I wanted to get to the end so I could get some resolution and not let the book keep bugging me (hahaha, oh GOD pun so not intended, I was trying to make a comment about the book getting under my skin and not think about the flies).
One of the disappointing things for me was how, although the book was set in London, it didn’t really feel like that was necessary. It was set in London because that’s the financial centres are, and, weirdly, where the MI6 hq are (The Bank took over the MI6 hq as their hq, in a subplot I admit did not really work out for me). It just didn’t feel like it was set in London, or that the characters were Londoners. Perhaps I’ve just been spoilt by the Peter Grant and Matthew Swift books.
Like I said above, this isn’t quite a rec. This book is really hard going, and I’m sure the rest of the series will be just as harsh (I’ve decided not to read it). However, if you’ve got a higher tolerance than me for insects/horror/horrible deaths and you like interesting plots and dystopic futures, this trilogy is worth a shot.
Tl; dr - in reading this book I found out my limit for depressing shit is, actually, Luther. Good to know.