Beautiful City of the Dead

Beautiful City of the Dead

“You know how if you turn the volume all the way till your ears almost bleed, how when it’s so loud there’s a quiet place inside the noise? Loud enough to shake your teeth loose but in there somewhere is a ghost voice, like silent singing. That’s the sound I want to get.”

Wow, okey.

Port O’ Call: “Beautiful City of the Dead”, a YA novel about teen angst, elemental magic and “Ghost Metal”.

Mateys: Leander Watts, whose name makes him sound like a shakespearean thespian, but is in fact an English Professor who apparently does like metal.

Premise: Zee – the narrator and female bassist – meets Relly the first day of school. She finds him both attractive and dangerous. He invites her to join his band, Scorpio Bone, and she does. Then things get weird.

Relly is obsessed with creating something he calls “ghost metal” – a music so loud and so powerful you can find silence and peace and power within it. At their first concert they create the ghost metal, and Zee sees flames shoot up Relly’s arms. He tells Zee they are all Gods of elemental magic – Zee is the God of water, an antidote to his fire. Now that Zee has joined the band, they have “four, and no more.” The perfect unit.

But another group of Gods want Zee to be their forth, and they will do anything to have her.

It all sounds a bit … ridiculous, but the literary style in which it’s written gives a raw, wild quality to the imagery, making “Beautiful City of the Dead” a more enjoyable read than you might think.

Why it’s Krieg: I am fairly partial to any young adult book that might convince more young’uns to get into metal, play instruments, join a band and generally be more like me when I was younger (oh, the days …). If I had found this book when I was eleven, I would have been down the shops buying every Black Sabbath album in sight.

A true sense of music – our music – as a force for magic permeates its pages. I love how Watts combines the heaviness and fullness of the riffs, the fascination for ghosts and the dead, and the presence of the supernatural without coming across as hokey or satanic or overly simplistic.

I adored the ending – so many YA books end too quickly, as though you walked out of the room before the movie has finished. This book ends exactly where it should, and I am thankful for that, because the rest of the book was so short.

Why it’s Emo: The main character had a surrealist thought-structure, which made her seem less like a teenager and more like a Salvador Dali painting. Some will love the writing style, others will hate it. You would have to read the book to make up your mind.

“Beautiful City of the Dead” can’t be more than 35 000 words long, which is short, even for a YA novel. This, of course, causes some problems. The characters seem underdeveloped (some aren’t developed at all), and the second half of the book comes across as rushed and poorly thought out.

One Goodreads reviewer points out the book seems like three books in a series mushed together into one short narrative.

The evocative title “Beautiful City of the Dead”, refers to an old name for the town cemetery, where Zee and Relly go to find lyrics for their songs. However, it’s not until the climax of the book when we actually visit this cemetery – we simly hear about it through Zee’s narrative. I felt as though the author cut some important scene where the teens go to the cemetery and experience the magic of the dead. I would have kept this scene in – no one would accuse this book of being too long.

Quote:

“Now that we’re together, the four of us, it’s gonna start. The big time. The biggest thing you ever saw,” Relly says. “When we get cranking, the four of us, we can cross over to the other side, the other world. It takes four and no more. It takes four to win the war.”

Rating: \m/ \m/ \m/ three horns for beautiful imagery, but not quite enough depth.

What are you reading this week?

Love, Lies and Lord of the Flies
Steff