America and her ghosts

I attempted to read a book that was not for a book club, and dang, was it hard! I have read at least two intervening books in between when I started The King of Crows and when I finished it. This is not because it was a bad book—I have very much enjoyed all of Libba Bray’s The Diviners series, and this was a perfectly continuous installment—but seems to be largely a function of quarantine brain, where I cannot focus on anything remotely relaxing or escapist. After a couple of slow and/or false starts I got a little bit more into it about halfway through, I think once more of the earlier material had come back to me and this volume’s plot had gotten going. It is also possible that I had a harder time with the beginning because I am still mad about what happened in the last one with the anarchists, as anarchists are generally underrepresented in fiction.

 

This volume sees our motley gang of misfits chased out of New York by a mob/Jake Marlowe/the Shadow Men, scattered in several directions, and aiming to meet up in a sad little town called Bountiful, Nebraska. This is fairly fitting as it allows us to have folks traveling through different parts of America in a variety of different ways—Ling and Jericho travel by bus with an all-black women’s band doing the speakeasy rout; Bill, Memphis, and Henry travel the South by rail, boat, and foot; Evie, Theta, Sam, and Isaiah join the circus, which ends up being not quite as hilarious as it sounds (OK, sometimes it’s hilarious). As they travel, they keep coming across dust-covered towns completely devoid of life. They also, of course, keep coming across ghosts, and occasionally across the man in the stovepipe hat. 

 

The ghost stuff is all deliciously creepy, as it has been throughout the series, and is really the thing I read it for. The absurd ‘20s slang and bits and pieces of American history are just bonuses, although now that it is the ‘20s again we really do have to start bringing some of that slang back in earnest, for real this time. 

 

I’m a little sad this series is over, although on the other hand it’s nice to have something wrapped up neatly. The first book here captured my imagination almost 8 years ago, when it was mostly about occult stuff and less about politics, and I’ve enjoyed following the series as it’s taken its turns through different kinds of dark. Someday when I think I’m up for properly relaxing again, I might want to binge-reread the whole series in one go.