Review: Recommended
Rating: 5 out of 5
Date: 01 4, 2014
Within this Garden Weeping takes place two years after the first novella in the series Before Leonora Wakes, Red’s Mother has a visitor and not a very welcome one.A perfect example of Lee’s descriptive prose as a stranger knocks on their door – ‘The air smelled of burnt paper. And when Red glanced at the man’s eyes, he saw a fire consuming his pupils’. And – ‘His shadow stretched through the door, tendrils of near-night, and some of them lovingly stroked her neck while others probed deeper into the living room’.Red will meet this stranger again and he will take him into an alternate reality, as easily as folding a piece of paper and putting it in your pocket. This is where we will learn what powers Red possesses and what he is truly capable of.Interlacing two stories we travel with Red as he does battle with his nemesis, Leonora and we hear mention of her sister Proserpine who features later in the series. While in our world he goes to see his girlfriend Amy’s Father, a drug dealer on the path to destroying himself, Red has the power to hasten that journey before her Father can destroy her completely but is he capable of such a thing.This is powerful and compelling fiction, dark fantasy fracturing into horror, a natural flow like the movement of a shadow and an absolutely gripping pace, I can’t recommend this highly enough.