The Damned Lies Project

Hiromi Goto’s novel Half World is a hard one for me to review.  I love the concept and the themes used in its world, but unfortunately I just could not get into the story itself.

The background of her story are three metaphysical realms: the Realm of the Flesh, where beings live their normal lives, Half World, the after-death realms where they relieve their greatest trauma to work out their issues, and the Spirit Realm where they end up after their traumas are understood and learned from.  Eventually the spirits return to the Realm of Flesh and it starts over.  But a great division happened and all the worlds became separate from each other.  Beings in the Realm of Flesh reincarnated there with their issues not resolved.  Spirits stayed in the Spirit World, distant and aloof.  And those in Half World stayed there, never dying, never moving on, just endlessly reliving their traumas.  For centuries this division has existed and only a prophecy of a child born in Half World to break the cycle. Read the rest of this entry »

Will Barbee is a reporter dispatched to cover the return of one of his former college professor’s return from the east where they were on an archaeological expedition for two years.  There he meets the alluring April Bell, a new rival reporter who both draws him to her and scares him.  Fresh off the plane, the professor begins a speech about how the box they retrieved carries the most important discovery to mankind.  He begins to talk about a darkness that has plagued mankind for millennia.  He tells of the emergence of an antichrist-like figure known as “The Child of Night” and how his discoveries of what’s in the box are vital to mankind’s survival.

Halfway through the speech, the professor dies suddenly.  While most think it a heart attack, Barbee discovers that April strangled a kitten ritualistically during the speech and somehow knows that this is related to the professor’s death.  Despite that, he asks her out to dinner and starts a strange journey into darkness.  During the day he worries about his friends, the other members of the expedition who are dying one by one.  At night, he has strange dreams where he is brought into a world of dark witchcraft and lycanthropy, where his actions are related to the bad things happening.  Are they just dreams?  What is in the box?  Who is the Child of Night? Read the rest of this entry »

Read the rest of this entry »