cedar_grove | Finally finished this... (Reply)

"...You have galloped around like a mare in heat through the composure of your race!" Metatron to Gimel, Burying the Shadow - (a fantastic reinvention of hte vampire myth) by Storm Constantine.

With a book written by Storm, one thing you can safely bet on as you begin to ead it is that 'all bets are off.' Storm Constantine is an acquired taste - extremely intellectual in a bizzarely creative kind of way is probably the best description I can give. I've read a total of four of her books now, and three of those concerning the Irin. I enjoyed those three I think due to their subjecct matter. This book I came to with caution. I will confess I found it extremely difficult to read, as evidenced by the fact that it took me about five weeks to finish a book that would normally only have taken a week for me to read - two at most. It's not badly written, not at all, just involved and one that you need to read in small chunks. However, even having finished it, I'm still not sure I like it all that much. The second half is certainly better than the first half - I read the second half in about a week.

The story claims to be a reinvention of the vampire myth, and I suppose to a degree it does concern vampirism. Personally though I would say it was a reinvention of the Angel/Irin mythology. The story is told, first person, from the point of view of two very different characters. The first is a human woman, Rayojini, from a place called Tap, where this particular race of human have the ability to walk into the 'soulscape' - rather like the astral body - of another person, and heal the person by eliminating the shadow of fear that lurks there causing whatever the illness happens to be. The second is an Eloim woman called Gimel, who is from a powerful family among a race that lives segregated in a city called Sacrementante, who are considered by their human neighbours to be artisans. Gimel is trying to solve a serious problem among her people. They are becoming afflicted by despair and are subsequently taking their own life - unheard of among these otherwise near immortal people. She decides to 'grow her own' tame soulscaper by influencing the life of Rayojini until she is old enough and strong enough to come to Sacramentante and enter the soulscape of the Eloim. Of course many things happen to Rayo and Gimel along the way which make things far more complicated that that and in the end... well lets just say it becomes a polar spiritual battle.

The Eloim feed on the blood of patron humans who willingly allow them to do that. That's where the vampirism comes in... the rest is barely veiled references to matters Angelic and the Irin mythology. A fall from grace - as the Eloim are expelled from their own world, access to their spiritual power denied to them by the closing of the gate between their world and Earth, and family names such as Metatronim. Many of the Eloim character names end with either 'el' or 'il' or 'he.' And of course in the end their true form is revealed, which just underlines it all. I don't think Storm every denied this was what she was trying to do, I rather think it was others that fixated on the vampire part rather than the Irin.

As you'd expect of a novel written by Ms Constantine, it's full of religious and spiritual symbolism, extremely visual vistas and weirdness abounds. There's also a healthy dose of both conventional and unconventional sexuality. In the end I suppose it is very well researched and cleverly constructed, and maybe it's just that I, myself, have done so much research into the Irin and their legends, but I was pretty much able to predict the ending once certain events had happened in the story. That's not to say that I was disappointed by the way the book ended, more a case of, "Yeah, that's really the only way it could have gone to make sense and retain the integrity of the story."