A God in the Shed

There’s a god in Saint-Ferdinand, Quebec, Canada. This book follows an anger-fueled sheriff as he tries to hunt down the infamous local serial killer, who had been plaguing the town for twenty years. But there is so much more going on.

When Sam Finnegan, the local hermit, is discovered with the bodies of sixty people on his property, things really spiral out of control. The god gets loose and is accidentally trapped by young Venus McKenzy in her shed.

What comes next is a psychotic episode of the Twilight Zone. Carnival freaks, an all-powerful god who likes to play with the blood and bones of living things, the afterlife, and some minor occultism. It’s a rush to try and catch the god before everyone in Saint-Ferdinand is claimed by its evil.

This book starts of kind of cool. A young pair of kids find the god living in a cave – then we fast-forward a whole bunch of years and the god has been trapped inside the cave by a flimsy curse from the game Hide and Seek.

It’s totally ridiculous, but kind of makes sense. The rest of the book doesn’t make a lick of sense. The irate sheriff and his cool-headed son are good, but their backstories are completely off the rails. If he had just told the story of the god and the small town trying to stop it, this book would have been great.

But instead he tried to jam a bunch of magic and voodoo into a story that didn’t need it, and in the end the whole book falls apart and becomes a mess. I give it 6/10. The writing was only okay. The story was cool but over encumbered by too many themes and not enough thinking about explanations. I would call this lazy.