Preternatural By Peter Topside

 This was...interesting to say the least. 

Meadowsville owes all of its prosperity to one Mr. Smith. Who is Mr. Smith you ask? Well, I suppose it depends on who you ask because Mr. Smith is something straight out of your nightmares, one of the most well-documented urban legends to ever exist ensuring the town stays prosperous through the tourism Mr. Smith attracts. And if people go missing and gruesome murders are covered up well that's just the price you pay.

Vampire stories are almost always inherently Christian in that they represent the farthest away from god you can get, on multiple levels. And so it was nice to see the religious aspect brought into this book. Well, kinda. Topside takes it to a whole new, over-the-top level for me. Weapons imbued with the power of the Christian god only work if you *fear* god, with the assumption that you've done something to make you fear god in the first place. But if you don't eh you'll be fine even if you did murder a small child 😶. 

In a town where everyone is covering up murders for a paycheck everyone is gonna have some serious issues and it turns out everyone does. Mr. Smith or Blackheart, the bad guy's real name is Blackheart, Blackheart was actually the first victim of the real Mr. Smith and Blackheart is wreaking his vengeance on a town that ignored a small child in trouble. Decades after it happened, I'm not sure, to be honest, there's a mention of child Blackheart listening to a radio so anytime after 1890 and I'm assuming the 2010s. So Blackheart is messed up, really understandably messed up. The "hero" Christian is messed up after watching Blackheart kill his parents, David the other hero has an abusive alcoholic dad, and the whole freaking town is corrupt. The upside of this town that desperately needs a psychologist is that Topside does an exceptional job of describing what it's like to live with an abusive parent etc. The downside is I felt like there was just too much of it going on. After a while I didn't even really feel bad that this whole town had some serious trauma going on, it was just a shoulder shrug. 

Giant plot holes: Mr. Smith dies of old age but somehow Blackheart is a vampire. I pretty much considered not reading any more after that. Blackheart has zombie dogs it is never explained how those zombie dogs come to be although I suppose I should assume Blackheart wanted puppies so he turned some dogs. If Blackheart became a vampire because of Mr. Smith why did Blackheart age? Mr. Smith kidnapped him as a child. There are groups of "gangs" that roam at night I'm assuming to take out Blackheart but they are mostly all teenagers dressed up as superheroes (yes superheroes) or religious zealots who have turf wars. This is never explained and I'm not even sure I want it to be. 

Oh and Blackheart literally sits on rooftops playing a violin-like some creepy Fiddler on the Roof. I may actually watch Fiddler on the Roof now which is a really exceptional story about one man's argument with god. 

Overall I feel like Topside had a lot of really important stuff to say about parental abuse and sexual abuse of children and how these things can be completely ignored by the people that should be dealing with them, that the culprits get away with it while the child grows into an adult who can't have normal relationships. I also think he had a lot to say about grief and a lot to say about straying from god. And normally I'd say that a horror/fantasy book is the perfect place for all of that but I just wasn't feeling it here. It's simply too straightforward and there are simply not enough actual horror/fantasy elements going on unless you count the gore parts and that's really only a very small portion of what makes a good horror book. I've definitely decided I won't be staying in Meadowsville and Blackheart is the least of my reasons for leaving.