Rating:

Terrible Twists and Sloppy Shocks

Author: Gary A. Braunbeck

Coffin County is book four in Gary A. Braunbeck’s increasingly weird, irreverent Cedar Hill series. In this volume, a gruesome killer is on the loose, massacring diners to live out his destiny, constantly seeking his own death only to return and wreak carnage. The killer, however, has an affinity for the grieving cop on the case, leading him into a dark night of the soul that provides just as many questions as it does answers.

I came to the Cedar Hill series through a random eBay book lot many years ok. I started with Mr. Hands, the third book in the series, which focuses on another serial killer who performs an odd kind of justice by slaughtering those who hurt children. When I picked up Coffin County, I was surprised to discover that it was the next book in the series, and so, I dove in, without the benefits of books one and two.

While Mr. Hands was able to mostly stand alone, with the background of the town and its few supernatural fixtures just added elements of bizarreness, Coffin County isn’t so kind. You can jump in, literarily in the middle, as I did, and kind of figure it out. But it obviously was the author’s intention that this place become a character too and through multiple sequential books, readers would engage with a bigger, more epic story that built upon itself. The conclusion to Coffin Count is problematic for readers who aren’t familiar with the people and the town, and the big revelations (which I’ll say more about later) fall flat for those of us who haven’t been with the series since book 1.

Braunbeck’s voice, however, was enough to keep me turning pages, breathless, even thought it was clear early on that I should have stopped and picked up book 1 (In Silent Graves). But I was already hooked on Coffin County from the first chapter’s depiction of a ghost parade and an explosion, the oddly fated violence somehow tying in nicely with the empathetic characters. Part of the pull was the way that Braunbeck has of telling a story: a conversational, over-the-bar-counter on a slow night ease that makes you feel invited and present. Part of it was the very strangeness of the events. Part of it was the characters who, no matter how briefly they were glimpsed, came across as complicated and human.

Image by Nanne Tiggelman from Pixabay

Where the story lost me is part logistical and part idea and how the two merge, quickly, unclearly, with a sacrilegious twist that is just as vague as it is downright insulting. Here’s the spoiler lite version: everything is explained, but not explained. God is a tyrannical, violent, and oddly powerless entity, falling prey literarily to the “can God make a rock so big He can’t lift it idea.” The idea itself is anti-God, anti-Christian, and a logical mess. As a Christian, the entire thing was an insult laired on top of an insult; a story that paints God as half idiot, half monster.

But, even if you’re not a Christian and not especially off-put by sacrilege, you’ll run into other issues with the book’s structure and sloppy ending. This is another of those killer-conveniently-reveals-all-to-random-dude stereotypes, and I’m sick of it. Yes, this is fiction. Yes, we’re here, fully willing to suspend reality. But come on, after hundreds of pages of buildup and a surprisingly enjoyable police procedural, you have the villain just explaining everything, unprovoked, in a graveyard in a storm no less, with no one pressuring them to do so and no evident reasoning behind their sudden TED talk. Do better.

Then we have hints about who the two main characters in town are, creating another blasphemous and utterly confusing disaster. After such a careful buildup, so many clues, there is just this rushed, half revealed, half hinted at over-arching story that supersedes everything else we’ve been focusing on. What does it mean then, if these “people” are who the author is hinting they are? To readers, it means that we just finished the mystery to have the author essentially say, “oh, that was all filler, here’s the real story in sixty seconds; the last several hundred pages was just a waste of time side quest, hahaha.” Oh, and this brand-new mystery falls apart the minute the reader asks a half-way insightful question or starts pulling the threads that supposedly tie the parts together.

It gets worse too, because after the revelation that most of what we read was inconsequential side-quest stuff, we get one more “twist” that completely throws away all the careful character creation of our forlorn cop. All that build up, all that investment, all those hundreds of pages, and we get the equivalent of an evil laugh soundtrack and the author giving the finger to God in prose? I’ll have to let my other Braunbeck books languish on the shelf now. Not recommended, and I’m not coming back to Cedar Hill.

– Frances Carden

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Frances Carden
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