Order THE DEAD MAN, VOLUME 1 here
The paramedics arrived within a few minutes and immediatly hooked Matt up to an EKG, which, to Lyle's astonishment, showed a weak heartbeat, in the low twenties. Critical condition for a living person but not bad for a dead man.
I've said it a million time already, the breeding ground for new and interesting fiction right now is television. It's the only place right now where new ideas and not only encouraged, but heavily financed. A revolution like that is not even remotedly close to happen in literature, but the advent of the Kindle Store and ePublishing is a great first step towards the unleashing of creativity. A series like THE DEAD MAN would have never seen the light of day in traditional publishing. Novellas? Various authors? A relentlessly regular publishing schedule? Nobody would've taken the risk. But Lee Goldberg and William Rabkin hit the Kindle without the help of anyone in 2011 and it's a good thing they did.
THE DEAD MAN, VOLUME 1 contains the first three novellas in the series : FACE OF EVIL, RING OF KNIVES and HELL IN HEAVEN. The main complain about Volume 1 is that it is excruciatingly slow to start and it is. FACE OF EVIL is merely introducing the hero Matt Cahill. Not his ''gift'', not his condition, but Matt himself. Who he was before he died and what he left behind. There is little of what makes THE DEAD MAN special in the first novella and it sometimes feel embryonary, like Goldberg and Rabkin have no idea where to go with their premise. But then RING OF KNIVES starts, all hell breaks loose and THE DEAD MAN becomes a LOT of fun.
In the second installment, Matt hits the road and finds his way to a psychiatric hospital where a patient suffers the same ailments as him (seeing people rot while alive, having a sinister companion of misfortune). Matt wants to talk to Jesse Weston to understand better his own condition, but the hospital where he's kept is like a ship without a captain. It is drifting to a very dark place and Matt will have to go deep into its heart to find Weston. RING OF KNIVES is very different from FACE OF EVIL. It gives the feeling that it's happening in a timeless limbo of damned soul. Reality is suspended inside the four walls of the hospital. It's filled with freaks and misfits and the only way Matt can carve his way out is to hack and slash through them.
Matt balled his hands into firsts. He didn't know if he could take them both, but he was certainly capable of messing them up bad, despite having been dead for a few months. He felt as strong and as capable as he had the day he died.
And that knowledge made him smile. He wanted to fight.
Bring it on, assholes
HELL IN HEAVEN is considerably more atmospheric than its two predecessors, yet it's full of gory surprises. Back on the road after barely escaping with his life, he is steered by his asshole nemesis Mr. Dark into taking the wrong exit into a town called Heaven. Heavily inspired by Silent Hill (yet not a ripoff), Heaven is stuck in a timeless place, waiting for their hero to come back from war. They live under the thumb of a dark being who Matt is confronted to her right away, but he is also put face to face with the damages she has done to the community. They thought their problems were simple, but Matt uncovers a twisted truth lurking beneath the surface.
What made THE DEAD MAN, VOLUME 1 so much fun to read was the three authors' (RING OF KNIVES was written by James Daniels) willingness to leave reality aside and enter a highly symbolic, dark fantasy world where evil has a face, where suffering is literal and where a war is being waged. The city of Heaven was fascinating in that regards, because it was a place where the forces Matt Cahill is combatting had set up shop a long time ago and it displayed several layers of corruption. Golberg and Rabkin really took a biblical approach to their writing philsophy as men are pure like animals, yet some make themselves vulnerable to be touched by an invisible, unexplainable evil. There are so many possibilities with it.
THE DEAD MAN series is wild, fun and incredibly bold. It has a heavy hand with splatter gore, which can be a lot to handle at times. The description of festering pestilence and the descriptions of whatever Matt does to it can go for pages of details and it can get clownish at times. I took it as a reminder that THE DEAD MAN is a series that doesn't take itself 100% seriously, but it may bug some readers. But the sheer force of its creativity, its unique spin on the battle of good vs evil makes it a can't miss read for fans of horror and dark fantasy both. It's a welcome breath of fresh air in this era of easy scares, glowing vampires and sexy werewolves. Matt Cahill might not be on television yet, but he is one of the coolest things on the Kindle Store.