The Damnation of Charlie Wormwood

The Damnation of Charlie Wormwood #1-5

by Christina Blanch, Chris Carr, Chee Yang Ong (Illustrations)

How far will a man go to save his son's life? Charlie Wormwood leads a normal life as a husband and father... but between the modest salary of his prison teaching job and recent insurance cutbacks, he's not able to support his ailing son, Junior. With medical bills backing up, he treads a dangerous path to make things right. Someone has taken notice of Charlie's unique skill of photographic memory -- Faria Barnum, a criminal entrepreneur stuck inside the prison, whose organization on the outside needs strict, exact orders relegated from the top. If Charlie gives in, starts acting as a messenger for an inmate, what problems will he create for his family? And can he afford not to? A tense, heart-wrenching thriller from Christina Blanch, Chris Carr, and Chee, featuring an introduction by acclaimed comic book author Mark Waid (Daredevil, Kingdom Come)!

128 pages, Paperback

First published November 3, 2015

Reviews

[Keith Irwin · Rating 2 out of 5]

I feel as though I may be underrating this a little. The book is very vivid and the emotions involved feel very real. It's definitely doing its own thing and isn't cookie-cutter at all. But I really didn't enjoy it at all. For one thing, the plot felt quite contrived. The right things just seem to happen at just the right times to move things along. For another, the main character is a teacher in a prison and every prisoner who actually spoke at any point felt like a stereotype. It felt like it was cherry-picking the worst aspects of everything. I was also a little bothered that almost all of the female characters in the book are kind of terrible. They're mostly helpless and selfish whereas the male characters are mostly strong and resolute (although perhaps misguided).

In the overall, I think what it had the hardest time overcoming with me is that it's just so much a story of powerlessness and misery that it wasn't any fun to read at all. I didn't hate it because the good aspects of it do buoy it just a little, but I don't expect I'll read any more of it.