[Book review] A Hundred Words for Hate by Thomas E. Sniegoski

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I’m not normally one for novels with a heavy religious baseline, but something about the Remy Chandler novels intrigued me.  The series first came to my attention when I read a novella in the anthology Mean Streets, and I ended up hunting down the first novel soon after.  A Hundred Words for Hate is the fourth novel in the series, and unfortunately, it just doesn’t live up to the previous stories.

After losing his wife Madeline to disease and age, Remy never thought to love again, but he finds himself in a budding relationship with Linda, whom he met recently.  But they barely have time to explore what they feel for each other when Remy is once again caught up in the events of Heaven and Hell.

The Sons of Adam, protectors of the original man, seek out Remy to enlist his help.  The Garden of Eden is returning to the world, and a dying Adam wants nothing more than to be buried there.  The Sons of Adam need Remy to help them find the key that will open the gates of Eden—gates that, coincidentally, Remy shut all those eons ago.

And deep within the bowels of Hell, Lucifer Morningstar is rising, threatening Heaven and Earth once again.

I usually look forward to a Remy Chandler novel.  The previous novels have done a good job of meshing detective storytelling with the mythology of Heaven, angels and the divine.  I haven’t had trouble suspending disbelief until this most recent novel.  But there’s just too much here that doesn’t make sense to me.

The biggest problem I had was with the existence of the Sons of Adam and the mirror organization of the Daughters of Eve.  Each organization is said to be directly descended from the original man or woman, and each member is granted an extended lifespan.  However, if readers are to believe in the existence of Adam and Eve, then they must also believe that they are the progenitors of the entire human race; as a result, we are all descended from both of them.  There is no explanation of how one particular group can be descended directly from one of the original humans and not the other, nor why these people are special when we are all supposedly descended from the first man and woman.  If Sniegoski had given me a single line of explanation, I might have been more forgiving, but this is merely handwaved away.

Another thing I found odd was the storyline about the Garden itself.  Supposedly, when Remy closed the gates, Eden was “unmoored” from the earth and began to wander through the universe.  Later in the novel, the author states that Eden has been moving from “world to world” and has “traversed a multitude of realities”.  If there are other worlds and realities, why is Heaven and Hell solely tied to our world?  On the same page as the previous quotes, Sniegoski says of earth and the Garden “kindred spirits, they were, for both had been shaped by the Almighty.”  If Eden has been wandering unfulfilled among many worlds, then we can infer from this statement that none of the other worlds were made by God; and yet, we are to believe that God created everything in the universe.  It’s incredibly contradictory.

The other storyline happening concurrent to the Eden plot is Lucifer rising from Hell.  The author has us witness this through the eyes of Francis, a fallen angel who’s been working as an assassin for the Thrones, powerful angels serving the will of God.  Through much of the novel he remains gravely injured and unable to act.  In fact, much of his contribution to the novel is through his flashbacks to the early twentieth century.  It splits the Hell storyline in two, jumping back and forth from “then” to “now”, sometimes with no warning.

Neither plotline really goes anywhere solid or contributes much to the overarching plot of the series.  At the novel’s end, Eden is gone again, Lucifer has risen, and Remy goes back to a normal life.  The only eral loose end that may cause events in future novels to play out differently is Francis.  His choices near the story’s end will likely have long-lasting consequences, but what those are will remain to be seen.

My favorite character continues to be Marlowe, Remy’s faithful dog.  Since Remy is an angel, he can understand Marlowe, and his interactions with the big black mutt are among the best in the book.  I just wish there had been more of them.

I suppose that every author must have a book which just doesn’t work as well as the rest, and this is Sniegoski’s.  I do hope that the next novel returns to the standard that I’ve come to know.  I shouldn’t be reading a story simply because it contains a charming dog.