The Book: Mordiscado by Misti Rainwater-Lites

Review Category: Buys > Priority

The Blurb: What do you get when you put the brains of Stephen King, Hans Christian Andersen, the Brothers Grimm, Edgar Allan Poe and Misti Rainwater-Lites in a blender? You get an unholy mess. Mordiscado is an unholy mess. Eat it. It is good.

Preview Available: Yup a perfectly satisfactory lulu one. Reassuring the reader that the prose is readable whilst not really giving anything away.

Why buy this? The preview was very good. Ms Rainwater-Lite posted to a thread I’d started requesting that POD authors put themselves forward on the NaNoWriMo shameless promotion board. Looked like the kind of thing I could well read. Affordable.

The Product: This is very confidently a POD novel. That is to say that although it doesn’t really resemble a commercial book it is its own product produced by someone who’s used to working in this medium. The book suffers from a total lack of indents but as it happens this isn’t a problem at all. I think the best way to put it is that the book “gets away with” a load of things. I didn’t have a problem with it.

The Nitty Gritty: I am becoming a real reviewer.

I do not bound towards a work with hope and joyful abandon. I slink towards it with narrowed and suspicious eyes. The gems are rare.

This is one of the gems.

This is like chick lit, erotica, horror, contemporary fiction and poetry were all handcuffed together, given baseball bats, dropped into a dark sack with a single key, bound up tight and dropped into a river.

Let’s be plain this is a heady brew that won’t be for everyone. It’s pretty sexy, and pretty disturbing, and pretty intense. The emotion coming out of this book is just raw.

What impressed me most from the outset was the description of the emotional to and fro between a couple experiencing some trouble because the wife knows her husband is looking elsewhere. Ms. Rainwater-Lites neatly sidesteps all the traditional tropes employed in the depiction of such a scenario settling instead for an unvarnished view of a couple where the woman fears she’s insane and the man is just being an out and out ass.

I’ve been in this emotional place of not getting my partner. Reading this actually helped me gain a new perspective on my own relationship. If a book can do that hell, that’s worth the price of admission right there.

The basic plot, not that it really matters overmuch, is that Zoe and Douglas, our married couple, move into Douglas’s grandmother’s house following the grandmother’s death. The house may be haunted, or maybe Zoe’s just cracking up.

Haunted house fiction like this always treads the line between supernatural occurrences and insanity. This one treads it deftly and with an assurance that stops the reader actually worrying about whether Zoe is really haunted or just insane. It’s unimportant, the important part is the emotional truth of the situation.

When the novel lifts into horror it really does pop. It’s amazing how one person can describe a creepy moaning ghost abusing the protagonist from the hereafter and it seems stale and another author can seriously creep you out. I think that the motivational context and the symbolism of the ghosts in Mordiscado provide the real chill. I don’t want to get too far in analysing it though, suffice to say it works.

This is not to say the novel is free of bum notes. Exchanges between Douglas and his mistress are far more redolent of the fantasy conversations Zoe might imagine them having than real conversations. The mistress herself is never more than a cipher. Male psychology is outwardly described to a tee but the male thought process is a little off kilter.

These details are minor and do not detract from the story’s very earthy passion and power.

I would also have liked to see a different resolution just because I felt it coming from a ways off. The ending itself was incredibly well handled even so. I’m not sure what I would have done because it’s really not my story, maybe asking for something different is asking for too much.

This is really fresh, really taut, gripping and involving stuff. If the right agent were to pick it up I have no doubt it could sell to an indie press or even a brave handler of outspoken contemporary fiction but Ms. Rainwater-Lites seems to have no ambitions in that direction.

If you’re laid back about sex scenes, disturbing religious imagery and description of relationships that’s never less than raw this book is absolutely amazing don’t miss it.

This is remarkable work and I can’t wait to read more from eBuLLieNCe pReSS.