Review: It all started with the bear
Rating: 5 out of 5
Date: 02 13, 2014
I first became acquainted with Steve Vernon's writing inSudden Death Overtime, one of the strangest and most original short stories that I've read in a long time. For an encore, he's written "Hammurabi Road," a story of a very strange outing by three young men plus their unwilling kidnapped prisoner one warm summer night in northern Ontario. Irvin, Donny, and the narrator - Hanny - were taking Tyree to a remote area for some frontier justice, Tyree being suspected of setting a fire that killed several people, one of the victims being Irvin's brother. It was a simple plan - kill Tyree - but on this night, nothing would be simple.An accident with the truck they were in was just the first of an increasingly bizarre series of events. It's impossible to say much more without spoilers, but suffice to say that the night held far more violence than the boys expected."Hammurabi Road" combined extreme violence, some really gross happenings, raw language, and even a bit of macabre humor to produce a marvelous story that kept me reading from the first paragraph to the stunning climax.A review copy of the book was provided by the author.