Book #11 for the year, Daniel Braum’s The Serpent’s Shadow. He and I have a mutual friend (hi Duane) on Facebook who also knows on FB pretty much everyone in the SF/fantasy/horror field, and who oftens posts when one of these people has a book going cheap on Amazon. Thus it was he drew attention to Braum’s book when the ebook was 99 cents on US Amazon about a week ago; I checked local Amazon, found the local price was similar ($1.54 in real money), and decided to invest.
Our hero is a young man, David, spending Xmas holidays in Cancun in the mid-80s. (The book is somewhat more recent than the Kane book from the other day, having first been published in 2019.) In the course of said holiday, he meets a young woman called Anne Marie and the two soon discover some of the old ways are still alive in the Yucatan jungles, and they have their own parts to play in the events. Fairly short book, properly a novella I suppose, wherein perhaps lies its main problem, i.e. the speed at which things have to happen, it probably could’ve done with a bit more breathing space. I did, however, find the critique of the effects of colonialism on the area interesting, with the white outsider David being more bothered by the damage that the spread of tourism has done to the natural beauty of the area while the Mayan locals acknowledge that it potentially gives them something more than the old chicle plantations did. It’s not great but it only cost me a buck fifty (rather better than the nearly $24 for the print edition), and I liked it enough that I want to read Braum’s other stuff now.
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