Here's a disclaimer to start out this review. Sandy Theriault is a friend of mine, up there in the wild frozen wastes of the north, and he asked me many years ago to take a look at a story that he'd written. I promised to do so, of course, but promptly forgot all about it until he published it as an e-book. So, with my apologies for that, the least I can do is to take a look now!

Technically it's a novella, because it runs around 30,000 words, and it reads very quickly indeed because Sandy throws everything but the kitchen sink into that word count, so much so that it's actually hard to identify its genre.

It's definitely a fantasy, because we're dealing with angels who punctuate their immortality by living individual lives on Earth, surprisingly not always as human beings. Gwendellyn starts out as a harp seal in Canada's northern Arctic, making it seem rather like a YA animal fantasy until hunters show up and club her three pups to death in front of her. Later we learn that she spent a long life as a fur trapper trading in this sort of death to provide for her family. Living lives on Earth, as whatever species, gives angels learning, context and understanding, all of which help them better support Project Earth.

From the YA animal fantasy, it moves into metaphysical fantasy as we visit with the angels out in space, where they look at what's happening on Earth through a mystical Viewstation. Some of what they do is on the micro level, like influencing a woman to lie to her husband that she's pregnant so that he won't get onto a plane that's about to crash. However, a majority of it has a serious macro scope. For instance, we learn that Jesus, John Lennon and Kurt Cobain were all angels living out human lives when they were called back to the celestial realm to take care of some crisis or other. Lennon's out there right now keeping a sun from going nova prematurely and wiping out an entire solar system.

Eventually this focuses into the battle between angels and demons that you might expect, but it isn't remotely traditional. Usually, when we see this sort of thing, whether in a book or a film, the angels and demons know that they're angels and demons and they work their good or their evil accordingly. Here, they don't. When angels enter the physical form of someone on Earth, it merely allows them to grow up and live a life as that person. Their angelic soul will drive them in a general sense, but they won't know it's there, outside of an occasional bleeding through of knowledge that's what has fuelled belief in reincarnation.

In other words, when Zander spies through the Viewstation something on Earth that shouldn't be there, something that crackles in purple, he heads down to take care of business, but not by merely showing up the way we expect. He sends his soul into the baby created after that lady a couple of paragraphs ago lied about being pregnant to save her husband from the plane crash. Fast forward to the grown-up Daniel Strong and he's a former detective working as a PI after a career on the force ended through drug abuse. Something went wrong when Zander travelled into Daniel and it's meant a very hard life.

However, whatever problems he's had, he's still a good man doing good things, like saving a boy from a paedophile priest who promptly leaps off a balcony to his death. This does get dark very often and may well cross a lot of boundaries that some readers aren't willing to cross. No, folks, the dog doesn't die, but the seal pups do and the fourteen-year-old boy and the ants under the magnifying glass and, well, at one point we watch the universe form, wiping out the elves and the demons and whatever else lived in the world inside a mysterious black ball. Sandy does get trippy at points here and it doesn't remotely surprise to find that Ex-Detective Dan discovered a lucky silver dollar that crackles in purple while he was high on LSD.

Anyway, there are serial killers and cannibals and paedophile priests and, well, let's just point out that, at one point, a character rips off someone else's arm and beats them with it, which is about as bloody as you might expect. So naturally this is a romance. And an action movie and a mystery and a horror novel. Did I mention that Sandy crammed a lot into this novella? It simply keeps adding up, all the way to the point where I realised that he wasn't really writing a story, he was storyboarding a comic book in prose. I started to see sections in different colours and a lot of where it ends up felt like I was dancing from comic book panel to comic book panel, from anime scene to anime scene.

It's certainly a singular vision, with both those words equally important. While there may well be moments that I could guess at an influence for, this is emphatically original, so much so that it may well turn some readers off. And it's a vision, meaning that we really ought to see it. The words tell us what happens but even someone like me with aphantasia who can't see an image in my head knows that everything is visual, right down to the reveals and twists that rely on an entirely visual gimmick.

So I ended up trawling through all the many genres this novella plays in but discarding them all in favour of cult movie. I hope this sells well for Sandy, just like I hope every book written by any friend of mine sells well; but I'm going to think of it as a step on the way to an animated movie. This is the sort of thing that some obscure zine editor back in the eighties would have found on the end of an anime tape he traded with a Japanese fan for 'Monty Python' episodes, wrote up with copious screenshots in his zine, then traded it on so readers like me could watch it travel a circuit, blowing the minds of every zine editor it stopped at. And, forty years later, someone like me would write about it in a book like 'WTF!? Films You Won't Believe Exist'. ~~ Hal C F Astell