Containment: The Death of Earth: A Novel and Grimoire

by Charlee Jacob

The dead pass through the living like threshing machines.
The plagues are now at the top of the food chain.
The End Times.
The Death of Earth.

The Angel keeps him imprisoned inside the house so the Arch Angels won’t find him and kill him. For he is an abomination, he is Nephilim. Or so he’s told. He is forbidden to set foot outside. Beaten, mutilated and lied to, he rebels and opens the door…

He is the very first survivor to make it out after the event known as Pacifica decimates the west coast. Who is he and why does he only have one eye and the bruises of the abused.

Adam Grigori, is a two-time Noble Peace Prize winner and expert on diseases. He is always the first to enter the gruesome aftermath of world-wide devastation and to help cure the sick. And when the world’s active volcanoes begin erupting, Adam runs into the thick of it. He’s always avoided harm, as if he had an angel on his shoulder. But this time, in Italy, he runs head first into Hell. And what he brings back could mean the end of mankind.

The phantoms of each man, woman, and child who ever perished from disease; every pack, herd, and pride, every school, every flock and murder, once dead, now sought to unravel from the clay; and to embrace their living kind as an accursed kiss dissolved in a pestilent wind. The oceans and seas burned with the red tides. Flora rustled and were purged to nothing by swarms of locusts, ants, weevils, beetles, worms, and moths both living and dead—finally only dead.

Containment is a novel of world-wide devastation and the race to save mankind. Bram Stoker Award winner Charlee Jacob delivers a beautifully gruesome picture of an apocalyptic nightmare. A pure masterpiece of modern horror fiction.

Genres: Horror

244 pages, Kindle Edition

First published August 17, 2017

About the author

Charlee Jacob has been a digger for dinosaur bones, a seller of designer rags, and a cook - to mention only a few things. With more than 950 publishing credits, Charlee has been writing dark poetry and prose for more than 25 years. Some of her recent publishing events include the novel STILL (Necro), the poetry collection HERESY (Necro), and the novel DARK MOODS. She is a three-time Bram Stoker Award winner, two of those awards for her novel DREAD IN THE BEAST and the poetry collection SINEATER; the third award for collaborative poetry collection, VECTORS, with Marge Simon. Permanently disabled, she has begun to paint as one of her forms of phsycial therapy. She lives in Irving, Texas with her husband Jim and a plethora of felines.

Courtesy: http://www.williamcookwriter.com

Reviews

[Worms · Rating 2 out of 5]

Having recently finished This Symbiotic Fascination, I was excited to check out some of Jacob's newer works, but this one doesn't deliver.

It starts off pretty well, the boy/angel plot is very intriguing and feels like it has serious potential. The Africa plot is initially a bit underwhelming but definitely had potential. However, right as both storylines are hitting their stride, there's a time skip of 25 years(!). After this, the book absolutely takes a nose dive. The Adam Grigori chapters are nothing but infodump and exposition - I mean, there is a three page run of JUST the names of fault lines, followed by another page or two of JUST mountain names. Wtf? At this point the book transforms into a textbook of geology and italian history, none of which seems to play a particularly important role in the narrative itself.

We eventually make it back to Louisa, but her story is mostly hopeless/tragic wartime traumadump which crushes your soul, and not in a way that makes you want to keep reading.

This book feels both very pretentious and very unfocused. There is a constant stream of purposefully abstract/obtuse prose which is hard/impossible to follow. To make it worse, almost all of the "cool" scenes come in the form of nebulously defined dreams or hallucinations. It becomes difficult to tell what is actually going on in the story when there are so many of these dream/vision/hallucination scenes.

When it's not being abstract, the text tends to comes in two forms: pure exposition/infodump, or quotes from other works (there are seriously SO FUCKING MANY quotes, everywhere; one section is literally 10-12 quotes in a row). It seems like the author was overly eager to take all of the stuff she was interested in at the time (western occult, africa, italy, history, geology, physics, poetry, etc) and forcibly cram it into a single book without paying heed to how to massage it all together in a way that makes sense, and/or develops/pushes the narrative forward. I seriously doubt there is a single person who has read a Charlee Jacob book and thought "if only this had more hard science!"

There are still glimpses of what I was here for - Jacob's incredibly macabre & creative imagination, and her describing fucked up stuff in beautifully poetic ways, but it's few and far between. The Adam Grigori stuff is extremely mundane, and even the hard-hitting sections are kind of underwhelming coming from the person who wrote Haunter.

I made it to about 60% and don't care enough to finish. Charlee Jacob writing an end times book with angels/magic should have been awesome, but instead it felt like she didn't know what she was trying to say with this book and the result is tedious and unappealing.