Empties
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- $3.99
Publisher Description
A detective discovers bodies without brains—and wonders if he’s losing his mind—in this tale of nightmarish terror.
What do you tell yourself when impossible things begin to happen? What can you say? You’re a police detective, but maybe you’re just not good enough and that’s what you have to admit, whether you like it or not. You see evidence of things that can’t be real, but you just don’t observe well enough to explain it in any natural way. Can you ask rational questions and still be crazy? Does it help any that you know your mind is gone? You’re trapped in a black comedy with a beautiful but fatal woman right out of an old poem by Keats, hoping to wake up from the nightmare, even if on a cold hillside—as long as you wake up sane.
Detective William Benek is faced with an impossible crime: bodies are turning up without their brains and without any indication of how the organs were removed. His only lead—an attractive woman—becomes more than a lead, and then drives him into a world of terror, where his sanity is questioned and he must stop a monster he can barely comprehend.
Listed as a Best Book of 2009 by Edge Boston.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
Reductive gender stereotyping and sloppy pacing sink this ambitious foray into psychological horror. When the autopsy of a homeless man reveals that his brain has mysteriously vanished from his unopened skull, Detective Benek is initially alone in his determination to pursue the matter. Then a dead priest is discovered in a church with his brain lying beside him and a woman named Dierdre Matera passed out in a back pew. Even after Matera drugs and rapes Benek and demonstrates her brain-snatching abilities on various other victims, Benek can't convince anyone of her evil predations. Zebrowski (Macrolife) builds a simplistic and biased portrayal of the mating game, casting women as cold predators and men as befuddled innocents. As the characters become mired in repetitious reflection, the reader is likely to feel as confused as the hapless protagonist.
