Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #979983 in Books
• Published on: 2008-06-13
• Original language: English
• Number of items: 1
• Binding: Paperback
• 144 pages

Synopsis
Twenty souls for his brother's life is a price that seductively beautiful Samson is willing to pay. Twenty souls drenched in blood, powdered with cocaine and more than one kind of ecstasy. A fair trade for the life of a brother. A fair trade for the life of a priest. And everyone he meets seems so willing to give theirs away. Samuel's faith often wavers. Diagnosed with HIV and in rapid decline, he hides his disillusionment in the rituals of the priesthood. But when Samson brings him the first blood-signed contract for a young woman's immortal soul, the steamy world of high fashion male models and the quiet decay of a sickly priest begin to writhe against the realities of life, death, and otherworldly power. Brotherly love is a deadly seduction, beauty a dangerous game. Come worship in the brutal temple of Orgy of Souls. Your faith will never be the same again.

Customer Reviews

Look at your personal demon in the eye
I liked many things in this book. From the short chapters to the deceptive quiet and loling pace of the narration, along with the familiarity of the devices and tropes used without the horrible clichéd feeling one sometimes gets. For though there's nothing terribly new about this tale of brotherly love taken to extremes, it does succeed in taking us from the familiar into estrangement without us protesting against it. In other words, it plays with our expectations and grabs us by the neck while we're not looking...squeezing gently till its natural end.

This nicely rendered story revolves around two brothers. Being a horror tale, we'll anticipate the terrible deeds done and suffered, But Wrath and Maurice - as the two characters one might add - are very distinct authors and the result surprises us for its seamlessness. Because, you see, the question put by the story to the reader is an ancient one: Why does God allow Evil to exist? And every single person develops a strong emotional response answer to this.

A priest and a supermodel, get to into a spiral of bad choices and situations, till they have to confront their ultimate desires and the inevitable hard choices. You'll find no papparazi in this one, but you'll have plenty of horror to look at.

Wrath James White, a professed atheist who dwells a bit on the question in an interesting afterword to the story, and Maurice Broaddus, who happens to be a church minister (of all of the things that could happen to a horror writer), each has its own answer, but they try to step out of the expected personal bias in order to just tell the story. And they succeed. Undoubtedly when you look at the story, but some qualms emerge when you think about it. The effort is laudable, and for what it's worth, it may well work with a lot of readers. Oh, there's some obvious stances played out between the two authors, and the are not badly played, but ultimately, I think they didn't manage to achieve that Absolute non-answer they were searching for. They get to an exquisite telling (and you'll definetly enjoy reading it) but God is, even by definition, a big enough concept to subsume everything, as long as you allow for it to be present (even if you clearly don't believe in him, and that is curiously what happens to one of the brothers in the story). Though you may thrash about and finally choose some sort of reasoning for the existence of Evil and Human Suffering, you are still aknowledging God's presence. This is why most stories, even in the horror genre, Good always prevails...though I won't tell you if it really does in this one - go read it!.