May 10th - The Muse (Arjay Lewis)

2.5/5

Last month, I attended an awards ceremony for my uncle's new book. While I was there, I met a few other authors, printers and the like and got to hear a lot of interesting pitches.

I read The Muse upon a recommendation from Arjay Lewis, after he saw my horror themed t-shirt. The premise was intriguing, a story about a famous author who gains artistic skill from a parasite that compells him to murder. The execution, however, was lackluster.

In an effort to give equal balance to plot and character development, both suffer underdevelopment, though I found the characters to be the more glaring problem. The narrative is a running loop of similar actions, where the serial killer kills someone, runs, and is followed closely by law enforcement, several times over, with little interesting variation. The characters feel incredibly straightforward from the get-go, and often state what they're thinking to the audience with little room for analyzation, subtext, or satisfying character development.

On a more personal level, the characters just do not click with my tastes. Our two protagonists are a cop shirking due process in order to catch a serial killer (and being rewarded a position with the FBI at the end of the book), and a down on his luck author/history professor who comes across exceedingly milquetoast. I dislike cops on principle, and while a bookish wifeguy can be charming, this one was simply not written interestingly. The cop, who has been mourning his dead wife for 450 pages, "love at first sight"-s with the history professor's doctor with little to no fanfare or actual build-up. The history professor has no development beyond fear of the parasite controlling his body and overcoming that before magically getting better at writing because it "taught him" how to write well.

Additionally, almost all the women are either supportive pillars to men or murder victims, and there is a near constant focus on sex that reads gratuitous. The serial killer always gets some kind of sexual satisfaction from his murders of women (and only starts killing men when riddled with more "primal" bloodlust), which results in a frankly unecessary rape scene. The history professor and his wife frequently reference their sex life in a way that feels like it was intended to be sexy but just comes across as clinical (and also ends up with a scene involving minor sexual violence as the parasite further influences the professor). At one point, a comment is made about the commonplace brutalization of women in horror, but it feels trite when the book itself does the same.

Overall, it's perfectly servicable and the prose itself isn't bad, but I ultimately wouldn't recommend this to anyone looking for something beyond your classic serial killer story. It just overtly reads like a man wrote it.