Go For the Climate Carnival of Mysteries
paranormal m/m
Cranky Tiger Press
8/28/24
Kindle
398
Amazon
Amazon Link: amazon
Seventeen-year-old Zeke Graham grew up the black sheep of his ultra-conservative fundamentalist family, with parents who rule with an iron fist and siblings who scorn him for not being perfect enough. The night he finds out the older brother he never knew about has died, his world starts tumbling down. Luckily for him, not even death can stop his brother Gabe from meddling.
With the support of his newly demonic brother and other unexpected allies, Zeke is determined to bring down his abusive parents and make a life for himself. Now he just has to figure out if that life will be in the living world or with the family in Hell he's rapidly coming to care deeply for. Either way, it just might have to include an oddly familiar vampire who seems to delight in making him turn red. One thing's for certain: Hell's emotional climate is far better than he expected, and he's not sure he wants to leave.
Review By Ulysses Dietz
Member of the Paranormal Romance Guild Review Team
Amazon Link : amazon
Like other books in this second season, “Go for the Climate” is a sequel, and a powerful one. Zeke is a seventeen-year-old boy in a terrible situation. His father is the pastor of a Fundamentalist megachurch, and his life is a dreadful trap of rules and punishment. His parents starve and beat him for imagined infractions, always citing their version of scripture to justify their actions.
But Zeke is blessed with lucid dreams, and in those dreams he finds some escape from the nightmare of his life. Then, after a particularly brutal evening, his dream takes him to the Carnival of Mysteries, with Madam Persephone as his guide.
This one made me cry. Child abuse tied to religious zealotry is a hard combination, and Lark has done his homework. Amazingly, Ander Lark manages to add humor to the narrative, lightening the pain and sadness he describes with Zeke’s own sense of wonder and curiosity. It’s the first instance of the Carnival appearing in a dream to set its path in motion, and also the first in which Madam Persephone is the chief instigator. Errante Ame appears, but only in a minor way, as if to give his blessing to what has happened.
Zeke, helping his younger sister Abby, works to free himself from the prison of his family, and to punish his parents for what they have done—and not just to him—in the name of religion. Encouraged by the spirit of his older brother Gabe, about whom we first learned in the previous book, “Go for the Company,” Zeke and Abby make their way to freedom, and set about building a life in a place they didn’t even know existed. Everything they have been taught is wrong—skewed to satisfy those who seek power rather than justice.
What I loved most about this story—about which I’m being very vague so as to spoil no surprises—is the overturning of the common wisdom of Christian belief into something that surprises, even shocks, but ultimately feels humane and kind in a way these two brutalized teenagers have never known. There’s a sort of antic sitcom silliness that infuses the second half of the book, one that effectively casts out darkness in the name of love. It’s a wild ride, unlike any other book in the Carnival series.