It’s difficult to know what the actual point is when a novel chucks everything but the kitchen sink at readers, though it does feel, from all the earnest chucking by author Rasa Samimi, that there must be a point in this mixed and bloody stew, somewhere. Let’s put it this way, historical and religious themes show up in WHERE THE DEAD GO. As does Hitler. After all, it is categorized as fantasy. However, even fantasy must follow some sort of gripping storyline that holds to workable storytelling logic, allowing readers to suspend disbelief. The main flaw of the book is that while readers might get and even agree with concepts like the standard practices of factory farming utilized against animals meant for human consumption are grossly inhumane (as many hard hitting non-fiction books and films have documented) and while some fiction projects in the horror genre have successfully explored turning the tables towards humans being the ones subject to ‘farming’ and shown subsequently on dinner tables of animals, aliens, or other humans–with a horror or thriller tableau this is to be expected.
Disturbing blood and gore can be useful in factual documentaries depicting crimes, and it also can be what audiences of horror fiction want. Not so usually in fantasy novels, a genre more known for world-building adventures, magic, heroes and villains, and a dramatic plot that makes sense. Do most fantasy readers want to immerse in detailed scenes of human castration? Scenes of young boys strung up by a leg to have their throats slit? Scenes of feces in mouths? While the concept of the dead going to Earth’s dark matter doppelganger resounds with potential — a place religious readers might easily liken to Hell especially since the main character’s name turns out to be Adam — this is promise not fully delivered upon. Instead, it’s as if Samimi threw every single concept they could think of onto the page, without using these as building blocks to support well thought-out themes, and thus not adequately tying them all together. Additionally, artificially lyrical language in places reads as cloying: “From outside its vertex a blazing glow bathed the cone in prismatic light…drops teared and tossed out of the writhing, braiding helix in concentric wreaths and hung aloft…”
Though explorations of topics such as what consciousness is offer potential to make WHERE THE DEAD GO fascinating, in the end the book reads more like a convoluted, fantastically strange horror novel than typically enjoyable fantasy.
~C.S. Holmes for IndieReader