I have a love/hate relationship with horror. I don’t want to be completely freaked out, reading only a page or two at a time and peeking at those from between my fingers, and yet horror that doesn’t fill you with some dread is probably not very good. Cherie Priest’s Four and Twenty Blackbirds sat in that middle
ground fairly well for me and I quite enjoyed the story.
Eden Moore sees ghosts. As a girl, they are sometimes scary and sometimes helpful. As an adult though, it turns out that Eden is the target of a 165 year old ghost’s plan for resurrection. The resurrector being a mysterious resident from her family’s past, living in a remote swamp in southern Florida.
I really liked the character Eden Moore. She’s frightened at times, stoic at others. Came off very strong to me, not the least a one trick pony. Most of the other characters are very much supporting characters and they only stayed around for a while until the next supporting character stepped up to the plate. I kind of wish some of them had stuck around longer, because they were interesting.
The story was scariest when Eden was a kid early in the book. Good ghost stories don’t have a punch line, as a character in the book states. At the end, we know who the bad guy is, and we know what he’s doing. Effectively, the story becomes action-adventure with ghosts and blood and gore. Priest’s action scenes don’t overdo things, and she does make them somewhat original. I particularly enjoyed Malachi’s inept but almost effective attempts on Eden’s life.
Plot-wise, the major story line was pretty good, though a little on the convoluted side. It was all set up by Eden’s adopted mother Lulu refusing to explain the whole ghost/family history thing. The episodes where Eden encountered her family’s past got more and more intense. Sometimes they were ghosts, sometimes they were real people. The final confrontation didn’t disappoint.
On the whole, while there’s a lot of small things to question, the well-done ghost story makes up for the imperfections.
Title: Four and Twenty Blackbirds
Author: Cherie Priest
Cover creator: John Jude Palencar
Series: Eden Moore; 1
Imprint / publisher: Tor / Macmillan
Format: PDF download
Length: 285 p.
Publication date: 2008 (originally 2005 with this text)
Subject: Orphans—Fiction
Subject: Young women—Fiction
Subject: Blessing and cursing—Fiction
Subject: Racially
mixed people—Fiction
Subject: Signal Mountain (Tenn.)—Fiction
Subject: Birthfathers—Fiction
Subject: Georgia—
Fiction
LC classification: PS3616.R537F685 2005
