Jennifer's Reviews > Dead Country

I'm always up for a romp with necromantic lawyers, but this was not quite the romp I wanted. A sequel of sorts to Three Parts Dead, Dead Country is a continuation of Tara Abernathy's story as she returns home for her father's funeral. As home is comprised of people who are provincial, superstitious, and altogether unforgiving of the acts of Craft done by Tara in her youth (it was ONE time! geez, get over the sucking of life out of the cornfield already), it's not exactly a happy reunion.

This is a much more intimate, and at least initially, smaller scale story than Three Parts Dead, and it has more of a feel of a coming of age story in which Tara faces her past, buries her father, deals with villagers who don't particularly want her help, sees her parents as real people apart from their role in her life, and debates taking on an apprentice.

It's okay, but my eyeballs glided weirdly off much of this content - and I like introspection, usually. The new characters feel mostly flat, and the action doesn't pick up until the end, whereupon it abruptly stops and hangs you over a cliff. Gladstone's imagination is still audacious, and there's more in here about how Craft and Tara's world work, but it was still a bit of a struggle to get to the end (and then that ending! ugh!). A weak three stars; probably wouldn't read a sequel.