Book Review: The Modern Prometheus by Jayson Robert Ducharme
Title: The Modern Prometheus
Author: Jayson Robert Ducharme
Release date: April 24, 2022
I’ve had this book on my Kindle for far too long. Featuring a stunning cover by Francois Vaillancourt, it was released only a few months after my own novel ‘Mastodon’ was released, which also has a Francois cover. Because of that, I was excited to see all of the other books that Francois’ artwork was adorning – and I still am to this day – which meant, I snagged this one when it was released… and it languished on my TBR ever since. Over and over, other readers whom I chat with books about a bunch kept telling me to give this one a go, and when I saw it coming up on the top of my TBR I was excited to dive into this.
Going in, I decided to not re-read the synopsis, instead wanting to be surprised and fresh.
What I liked: The story follows a man, who awakens in a strange place. He’s hooked up to machines, body feeling odd and off, and as he comes to, he begins to remember that his name was Peter. His life and memories slowly return, but one of the hands is not his own, instead a woman’s hand. He’s scarred, stapled and stitched and when the person who brought him back to life arrives, he manages to escape.
It’s evident that this is influenced by Shelley’s genre-creating classic, but parts of this also reminded me of M. Shaw’s ‘One Hand to Hold, One Hand to Carve.’ This ‘who am I’ mentality with the ‘what of me still exists.’ It makes for some really intriguing and claustrophobic moral dilemma’s. Peter knows who he was, but he’s not that man anymore. He sees this at his gravesite. He sees it when he returns to his home and runs into his wife.
But all the while he continues to change, to transform and when the end arrives, he understands he’s no longer Peter and he questions what his life will be like going forward. It’s got shades of what Tim McGregor’s ‘Eynhallow’ presented within it’s pages as well.
Ducharme gives us a lot of questions, but also presents a variation of possible answers, which worked perfectly to give us both a very solid fictional story, but also one that walks that line of bringing the fictional world into every readers real lives.
What I didn’t like: I really wanted to love this book, but the reality was, it was good, not great. Compared to Shaw and McGregor’s books, this one got close to the elevated ideas and delivery, but didn’t completely deliver when all was said and done.
Why you should buy this: Purely for what I said at the end of a previous section of this review, this novel worked so well to make the reader uncomfortable while reading it, but also to really force the reader to ask themselves what would they do while in that position in their real lives.
The story gallops along, the emotions are high and the introduction of accessory characters really gives this an extra depth.
Overall, it was a really solid and engaging read, and fits that bit nicely for a reader looking for a novel that’ll make them squirm but also want to hold their loved ones close. And this was does that fantastically.
4/5
