I’m going to come right
out and say it, Cartmel is great at writing all the characters into fleshed out
people. The biggest problem with Warlock is that Creed especially felt
very much like a stock character and in Warchild
he rectifies this by focusing heavily on who Creed is as a person. He is now an actual person who wants the best
for his children, but because all three of them are extremely odd and he has a
stressful job working for the Agency. He
can’t connect with his son Ricky, is extremely distant from his daughter
Cynthia and thinks his youngest Eve is already smarter than anyone in the world
as she can predict the future. He is
questioning his marriage with Justine and after having an argument he decides
to have in affair with a cuter model. He’s
a flawed character and you cannot help but agree with a lot of what he does in
the novel for a lot of the time. Justine
is also really good in the novel as now she finally has a lot of time to be a
woman and not have to worry. She is just
as confused about her children but doesn’t really show it. She also gets to be around her neighbors,
especially the nosy one as their daughters are friends.
Ricky is an interesting
character as he fuels most of the main plot of the novel. He is the child Justine was pregnant with at
the end of Warlock and because of the
drug in Justine’s system, Ricky has powers.
He always stands out in a crowd and attracts attention from other people
which he hates as Ricky wants to be an introvert. He wants to be the one of the normal people
and it is something that completely causes him to go inside himself. He is put at a special school where Chris is
teaching comparative anthropology under the guise of a Buddhist monk and the
principal is a smoking gardener who talks to his students man to man. Ricky’s story at school gets us to the real
climax where a school bully’s father comes into the school, kills the principal
and gets ready to go on a shooting spree.
This is something that catapults the Doctor back into the narrative
which is great. Chris’s portion of the
novel is the real problem because he really doesn’t have a lot to do in the
novel and doesn’t even appear until after halfway through the novel.
Roz actually gets a
better plotline as while she is in England and she is strong-armed into joining
the Agency and fighting off dogs which have been rising up. Her sections of the novel play out like a
thriller as the dogs just are rising up and she and Mrs. Woodcott from Warlock are held up in a home. It is a terrifying sequence as people get
their throats ripped out in bloody detail which is great for a story. It also leads very nicely into the
reintroduction of Jack who was left in the body of a dog at the end of Warlock.
This is of course the way that the Doctor and Benny fit in with the
master plan which I will attempt to discuss without giving too much away about
the big twist of the novel. The Doctor
and Benny are at the house on Allen Road trying to get Jack’s body out of life
support which is a series of hilarious scenes.
The Doctor and Benny get this hilarious relationship because the Doctor
doesn’t want to ruin the already falling apart gardens with the life support
fluid. They are hilarious bits of
dialogue in the stories which I really quite like.
To summarize, much like
how the novel actually ends, Warchild
is a really good novel that has some great characters with a great twist and
conclusion. 90/100
No comments:
Post a Comment