The Cunningham family has an unusual pastime: they kidnap men, torture them in the garage, and kill them, all in search of clues about The Temple. Paterfamilias Bill has been seeking The Temple since his youth, guided by semi-prophetic dreams. But Ashley Thomas Sheikh’s KENTUCKY BLOOD follows the obsession back to an insecure adolescent Bill, dealing drugs to high-schoolers and first grasping the tenets of gaining and maintaining power over others.

A gripping work of psychological horror, KENTUCKY BLOOD starts with a bang: “When you kidnap people, tie’em up, and torture’em in your garage, it changes your view on life.” The text is lithe and visceral. It often evokes beauty, especially of the natural world, in simple but tactile descriptions of “damp moss, wet tree trunks, musty fall leaves, and pine needles.” But KENTUCKY BLOOD is also modernist in its depictions of cognition and criminality. This appears in a violent, staccato beat of intrusive thoughts interspersed throughout the text, especially interrupting spoken dialogue. The effect evokes alarm, but also the reader’s sympathy; these characters do awful things, but in large part because they are fundamentally struggling to relate to reality. This textual sensibility extends to the metatextual as well. The novel is enlivened by excerpts from a fictitious biography of the pirate Blackbeard, an unsettlingly chipper series of reflections on how a charismatic leader holds power through brutality.

However, KENTUCKY BLOOD has a fundamental problem: it’s not finished. The built-up tension yields immense dissatisfaction by the time the book ends, major points pushed to a forthcoming sequel. One entire plotline (a pedophile with a fetishistic attachment to a doll), in addition to being unresolved, only appears to intersect with the rest of the plotlines in a single, glancing instance. Not every novel needs clear, conventional resolution, and some benefit from deliberately refusing it (Pynchon’s The Crying of Lot 49, for instance). But KENTUCKY BLOOD feels like it needs some kind of thematic or narrative climax—at least some local maximum—to give the text shape, an incentive for the reader to continue. As it stands, this shapelessness is not only dissatisfying; it makes it difficult to evaluate the success of other aspects of the text. There’s a fascinating, complex, underutilized kernel of friendship and queer love within one of the characters, but instead of being meaningfully developed, the arc passes through sexual torture sequences that seem to draw on tired tropes of the “depraved bisexual.” Without a complete arc, these sequences just feel weak, rather than like support building toward a greater end.

As a formal, stylistic exercise, KENTUCKY BLOOD can still engage a reader. However, the text needs restructuring or resolution for that strong vision and style to coalesce into a more satisfying product.

Ashley Thomas Sheikh’s KENTUCKY BLOOD has a deep, compelling cast of characters and a horrifically effective skill at building tension.

~Dan Accardi for IndieReader