The Supernatural Enhancements

This is a guest review from Deron O:

This epistolary novel by Edgar Cantero starts off strong from its beautiful cover art to its intriguing dust jacket blurb to its first pages. You can’t not want to love this book. Unfortunately, with each page, the story flags to where you’ll wonder if you have the mental stamina to read the next page, and finally when you reach that last page, with dawning horror, you’ll realize that a sequel is being threatened and cry, “No más.”

A. (his full name is never revealed), a distant European relative of the Wells family, unexpectedly inherits Axton House, the Virginia estate of the recently deceased Ambrose Wells. Jumping from his bedroom window, Ambrose committed suicide, oddly in the exact same manner as his father. Multiple story threads weave in and out: hereditary suicides, a haunted house, and a secret society that gathers at Axton House each winter solstice, now just a month and a half away. A. and his friend Niamh, a mute teenage girl, are soon entangled in this unusual blend of a haunted house story and a mystery.

Don't expect much character development. A.’s and Niamh’s motivations are unclear. I wondered why they believed that Ambrose’s death was more than a suicide, why they were searching for a ghost, and why they were bothering to solve the riddle of the winter solstice gathering. For most of the book, I wondered why A. didn’t just sell the estate and go back to Europe or better yet, remain in Europe and have his attorney sell the estate for him. The last few pages eventually provide some insight but then left me asking why these facts weren’t brought up earlier in letters and diary entries as they plausibly should have been. The only reason was to manufacture a surprise at the end. Upon close examination, the motivations of nearly all of the characters are thin or unremarkable. There are characters whose motivation, once the flowery language is removed, is that they have nothing better to do.

After nearly three hundred pages and the mystery unravelling at a maddeningly slow pace, the author introduces a deus ex machina to propel the plot into the final act in the form of a 26 page exposition revealing the secrets of the winter solstice gathering by a character making his first physical appearance. So expansive was the explanation that it made the previous pages seem for naught. The author is clearly aware of the unusual length when A. writes that the conversion was “...one of the longest I’ve had in my life.” (p 258) To make things worse, each revelation was far more interesting unrevealed.

A typical mystery novel affords enough clues to a clever reader to solve the mystery. In this novel’s climax, the antagonist is revealed, and as I should have unfortunately expected, his identity bore no relation to the facts presented before. In fact, the protagonists don’t identify him; he reveals himself. Again, Cantero seems conscious of all this when the mystified A. says, “...we never noticed (him)...” (p 353) As with the long exposition, the author realizes he’s made a mistake, but rather than correct the plot problem, he admits to it, as if his admission makes it okay. This is pure laziness. These are many examples of this same problem throughout the book.

I can’t wholly blame the author for all these storytelling gaffes. Where was the editor? The plot is a contortionist’s nightmare. I haven’t even mentioned the audio and video recordings that seem more gimmick than substance (reminding me of the worst found footage films) or the endless talk devoted to cryptography peppered over the course of approximately 120 pages.

On a positive note, rarely clunky, the prose flowed well with snappy dialogue. I was even more impressed when I learned that Cantero is Spanish and this is his first novel in English, a second language for him. There was no sign that Cantero wasn’t English speaking. Perhaps Cantero was being humorously self-conscious of his English when A. wrote in a letter that Niamh was ”...laughing at my prose and pointing out how pompous I sound. She says I read too much like Lovecraft.” (p 28)

This book could have be very good if the editor hadn't been AWOL. Can a book get a do over?

RATING: 2 out of 5 stars