Have You Read This? The Raven by Jonathan Janz

 

If every kind of story has already been done, then horror has yet to get the memo. Perhaps more than other genres, horror takes tropes and ideas that once oversaturated a market and make them seem fresh and intriguing. If you’re a werewolf, vampire, or ghost that dreams of getting their moment in the moonlight, it’s possible to simply hibernate a few years, wait till everyone’s moved onto something else and then come back strong. If you’re a story about the apocalypse, for example, you wait until the mania for The Stand and The Walking Dead has died down before returning to the forefront (especially in a world that currently seems like a dumpster fire full of burning, dirty diapers). Johnathan Janz has taken this philosophy to heart, while also applying the kitchen-sink method of worldbuilding, to create his new post-apocalyptic tale The Raven.

The Raven takes place after a DNA-altering virus is unleashed upon the Earth. Not only does this create people with X-Men style superpowers, it also creates some very unique monsters pulled from myth and legend, including but not limited to vampire, werewolves, and satyrs. Thrown into this world is Dez, a survivor who also happens to be a Latent, one who has no powers nor is a monster. With crossbow in hand, he scours the land to search for his lost love as he encounters a series of monsters (some human and some more than human) who see him as weak prey.

Credit to Janz for taking a premise that puts several genres into a blender to create this dystopian smoothie, heavily seasoned with Spaghetti Western. Dez is, however, not the typical steely badass that Clint Eastwood was in his movies, but rather a man trying and failing to make sense of a new world where he’s been bumped down several notches on the food chain. The book contains mostly random encounters with some of these monsters, but it does culminate in a bar fight that could be an illustration of an X-Men movie written by Robert Rodriguez and directed by Quentin Tarantino. The novel seems like a gigantic hodgepodge at times, but there are also some moments of brilliance, such as the barfight, and scenes which demonstrate this strange new world’s moral gray areas. The book tends to buckle under the weight of exposition at times, but it also provides a great set-up for an expanded universe, if Janz decides to go that route. He’s already laid the necessary groundwork in this book, but subsequent books could really let this premise soar.