Review: Cursed by Jeremy C Shipp

Don't judge this one by its cover.

When Jeremy C Shipp asked for people willing to read the ARC of his forthcoming novel, Cursed, I was keen but nervous. I’ve been following Shipp on Twitter and enjoying his quirky humour. I’d noticed that Jeff Vandermeer – whom I greatly admire – thinks highly of him. And I’d read an interview Shipp gave in which he described the themes of the book – sounding intelligent and articulate in a way most authors don’t. It all made me want to get my hands on that book! But… Shipp is known for writing weird, bizarro, paranormal stories and, as my regular reader will know, I’m not really into that.

What if I hated it? Shipp seems like a really nice chap. The last thing I want to do is take his book and then trash it.

But I needn’t have worried. From the first page, no, from the number at the top of the first page (#12), I was hooked. The writing is light, clever and witty. The characters are painfully human, touchingly self-aware, and really nice, in a dysfunctional, I wouldn’t really want to spend an evening with one of them, sort of way.

It is a book about being cursed. Ostensibly a story about Nicholas and his friends Cicely and Abby who are trying to find who cursed them so they can get their lives back, there is another book just beneath the surface, about people who are damaged and hurting and the cruelties they suffer in a world that blames them for being who they are. It’s about the real-world curse of being what life made us.

It is dark. For all its tight writing, flashes of insight, and sprinkles of lovely humour, the book never lets you forget that our hero and his friends are suffering, that this is not a nice world they inhabit, that bad things are happening to them and everyone they love. All the time. Relentlessly.

So I’m very relieved to say I can recommend this book to everyone. Shipp has obviously stared into the abyss of the human condition and the abyss has just as clearly invited him over for a drink and a chat.

Hell, most people will like the paranormal stuff anyway.

You can order your copy of Cursed from the publisher, Raw Dog Screaming Press, Hyattsville, MD, USA. ISBN (hc) 978-1-933293-86-8 (pbk) 978-1-933293-88-5.