False Cathedrals by: Jonathan D. Clark
Synopsis
At the heart of the novel is Daniel Bloom, a middle-aged psychotherapist who can’t seem to escape the haunting memory of his first wife, Karen, even after fourteen years have passed since her untimely demise at the hands of the infamous Side-street Shooter. Hoping to distract himself, Daniel aims his focus toward helping a patient find lucidity after spending well over a decade lost in a state of uncertainty.But it doesn’t help when he hears that the Side-street Shooter has started a new, violent rampage.
Evaluation
This book took me three times longer to read than any book before it, and for good reason: this book had more substance than any book before it. The title has seemingly nothing to do with the plot of the story, and there were a couple elements in the story that were pointless. But once I had read how the story had escalated, I most certainly had to know how it ended.
Unacknowledged Truths
Each paragraph in this book, especially in the beginning, was woven with unacknowledged truths to life. For instance, what Clark had to say about consumerism on pages ten and eleven: “Humanity…had become lazy. There was no effort to surviving anymore. Everything was handed to them. They had become easy prey, and the art of the well-worded advertisement had become their inanimate predator.”
Every page had a moment like this where Clark vocalized the unspoken, and often unnoticed truths behind death, loss, crime, and the general grimness of life. Reading them to get the story going, to even add motive to the character’s crimes, was worth reading. But after the plot had been established and the action had picked up, moments like this in the book seemed to drag on.
Page 82-86 specifically comes to mind when the video evidence of the Side-Street Shooter was being played on the news. The lead into that scene had way too much substance, and I almost skipped right past it to get to the action of it.
Readers Aware, Characters Oblivious
Clark has a phenomenal style of writing secrets that the readers know but the characters do not. For instance, he linked our three biggest players in the book by a mental health visit. When it happened, knowing the killer was sitting with the husband of one of his victims, my jaw struck the floor. This happened a couple times throughout the book when details would line up in a way that only we knew where they were headed. Who doesn’t love predictive reading like that?
Overall, I’m more disappointed in how long it took me to read the book than having read it at all. The story was unlike anything I’ve read before. I didn’t enjoy the amount of violence and vileness in the book, and I didn’t like being inside the killers’ heads, but that just means that Clark wrote them well.
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