It's ballsy to showcase poor grammar in the very first sentence of a book, but Triana calls it out in the second. It's not him writing, you see. It's Edmund Cox, a convicted serial killer with twenty-one known victims of primarily Asian descent, writing to Lori, who he considers a unique groupie. She's almost forty and has a keen interest in true crime, her correspondence with many killers what she needs to make her feel alive. However, unlike Cox's other groupies, like an often-mentioned Niko, she isn't lusting for him. She's interested in the story not the man.

When she visits him in prison, he gives her a quest. Go to a shack that nobody else knows about. In the shack is a chest. Inside the chest is a key. Retrieve that key and deliver it to the River Man. It's not a particularly complex quest, but it's out in the middle of nowhere, as you might imagine, and the River Man is hardly defined. The shack's already on the river. Just head down the water from there and apparently you can't miss him, whoever or whatever he might be.

Of course, Lori's up for this quest, but she has to take her sister Abby with her, and that's likely to complicate things considerably. She's a couple of years older, but she's also seriously handicapped, both physically and mentally. Kristopher Triana makes that clear quickly but through a barrage of brief glimpses. Her skull was split, leaving her with brain damage. Her legs are crooked and she's reliant on forearm crutches. She was paralysed below the waist for a while, but she's recovering a little and can now walk, albeit not trivially. It's hardly an optimal condition for anyone to embark on a deep hike into dangerous river country.

Five chapters in, we learn that she wasn't born this way. Twenty-eight years earlier, things were a lot different. Abby was fine, for one, and thoroughly enjoying being seventeen. For two, younger brother Peter was still alive at thirteen. The three kids were evenly spaced two years apart. What happened to change that we don't yet know, but we'll find out as we go. Maybe not as soon as we might like, because Triana knows what he can tell us and when, but it'll all come out and deepen a dark story as it's getting darker.

And it continues to darken gloriously. I actually can't take you much further than this because the beginning of spoiler territory starts shockingly early, but I can say that they make it to the shack, they find the key and they take it to the River Man. Largely, I can say that because it makes it all sound incredibly simple but it emphatically isn't. Triana's choice of quotes to kick off the novel is a good one. This clearly sprang from a listen to Nick Drake (his haunting folk song 'River Man' from 1969's 'Five Leaves Left') and some of its strange imagery was sourced from Tom Waits (a subdued 'Dirt in the Ground' from 1992's 'Bone Machine'). However, it plays out like extreme horror taking on Joseph Conrad's 'Heart of Darkness'.

It's telling that neither Conrad nor Triana really define where their rivers actually are. Conrad's Marlow journeyed down an unnamed river in deepest Africa. We can guess that it's the Congo but we can't really be sure and it doesn't really matter. Triana tells us that Lori and Abby journey on the Hollow River, but I don't believe he tells us which state that happens to be in. They begin close to a small town called Killen, but even that's misleading because it used to have a different name and was bowdlerised for reasons. Where Marlow and Lori are going isn't really a physical place on our maps, it's into somewhere different, somewhere deep inside themselves and not necessarily somewhere they should go.

There are other characters here, but only one of them shows up before we cross into what I think of as spoiler territory and him only briefly. He's a tease at this point, far more substantial later in the story when he reappears. The key players, if we rely on the back cover blurb, are Edmund Cox, Lori and the River Man. They're all pivotal to the story, but Cox and the River Man are bookends, ways to begin and end. The key players are really Lori, Abby and Peter, only two of whom are alive for the journey and only one of which is fully functional in the traditional way. Like Marlow, what they find is what they take with them, even if they don't realise it at the time.

I mentioned extreme horror. This might not seem it for a while, but that's emphatically what it is. Triana tackles some serious taboos here that I won't spoil, other than to say that the most horrific parts have nothing to do with the literal extrapolation from the "river of flesh" from that quoted Tom Waits song. Sure, it belongs on the shelf with 'Woom' and 'The Slob' and 'Talia', but it has just as much in common with far older stories that see getting what you want a tragedy. It could sit on a different shelf with 'Faust', 'The Monkey's Paw' and 'Heart of Darkness'.

I liked this a lot and it reminds me that I have a couple of other Triana novels on my shelf, signed no less, that I haven't read yet. However, 'Body Art' and 'Shepherd of the Black Sheep' both came out from Blood Bound Books and I'm looking forward to diving deep into that publisher when I've wrapped up this Books of Horror Go To List project, which should be at the end of this year. I think they have some sights for me to see and Triana's not the only author who will be showing them to me. Not all of that will be extreme horror, but not all of this is either. It's a psychological journey that relies on folk horror as much as the taboo elements. This genre keeps on giving. ~~ Hal C F Astell