How can a dream be dangerous?
This is the lucid dreaming murder mystery that readers are calling intriguing, compelling and original.
Alicia’s younger brother has been missing for two years. On the eve of her eighteenth birthday, she finds a book in her parents’ bedroom containing a hit list. How far is her mother prepared to go to return David to the family?
While lucid dreaming, Alicia escapes the waking world, entering a realm where survival depends on the strength of your will. Is handsome Ryan a figment of her imagination, or was he sent by her brother’s kidnappers?
The Order of Chaos by Ben J. Henry was an intriguing read for me. The plot follows Alicia, whose younger brother has been missing for two years. Of course, there’s also Alicia’s new neighbor, who isn’t all that he seems—or perhaps it would be better to say he’s more than he seems. And there’s also the girlfriend of the boy who drowned at Alicia’s school last year. Got all that? Good, because this book throws you in the deep end and expects you to swim.
This book is full of characters who have experienced a great deal of trauma, and as a result it could be triggering for some readers, particularly those who may have experienced the loss of a loved one recently. I think Ben Henry manages to handle this trauma well, and the way the characters are influenced by and wrestle with their trauma felt very authentic to me. This was the aspect of the book I enjoyed the most, and it was one of the top two elements to the novel that kept me reading. The other things that kept me coming back to read more were the mystery elements. There are questions within questions within questions in this book, and when one is answered it normally gives rise to several more. It’s hard to talk about any of these reveals without spoilers, but I will say that I generally found the reveals to be satisfying, even if they did create more questions that needed to be answered.
So, what didn’t I like about the book? The prose was a little wordy at times. Sometimes this meant things were over-described for my taste, but at other times it just felt like sentences were wordier than they needed to be. I tend to prefer tight, concise prose, and that isn’t the sort of prose that you’ll find in The Order of Chaos. To make it worse, most of the wordy descriptions were of physical things, with little description given to scents, flavors, touch, or emotion. This is doubly unfortunate because the book shines most when it’s dealing with the emotional trauma of the main characters. On top of this, the author tends to switch perspectives quite a bit, even in the middle of a scene, and without much in terms of formatting to indicate the perspective had shifted. This tendency had me going back at times to reread paragraphs until I figured out that the perspective had shifted. That’s not something I enjoy doing, and it quickly began to detract from my enjoyment of this one. I’ll also mention here that this novel makes use of the YA trope where all the adults are either idiots, completely unengaged, or mean.
It’s a shame that the prose wasn’t tighter with this one. I think if the author had tightened up the prose and had used a strictly third limited perspective for the characters, the overall experience of the novel—at least for me—could have been markedly improved. There was a lot of potential here, especially around the characters and their growth. At its core, there is a powerful story here about pain and trauma, recovery, friendship, hope, and belief. That’s what kept me reading. Unfortunately, that potential was never fully realized, and I think that this is at least partially down to the meandering prose. The lack of description around emotion particularly hurt in this case.
While these negatives keep me from putting this one forward for the others to read, I think there are those out there who may enjoy this one. There’s a lot of potential here and it may come together for you in a way it didn’t for me.
Verdict: Cut
This review was provided by Calvin Park as part of The Fantasy Inn’s SPFBO 8 contest judging.
