The Fury was now about fifteen feet away from the pier head.
Thunder didn't care.
At the end of the pier, at the end of his frantic gallop, at the end of Ireland, Thunder leaped.
Rose.
Soared.
They were suspended high above water.
Flying.
There was a human roar.
And then Thunder came down hard and splay-legged on the planked deck, skidding in a sliding, scattering rush, then pivoting somehow to avoid going off on the far side.

Even more so, the horse then jumps overboard, and swims back to shore, to reunite with Cormac's old dog. While certainly an implausible event, in reality, and richly melodramatic- even in this fiction, there is something very moving about the scene, which reminds me of a moment in the Werner Herzog film, Aguirre: The Wrath Of God, where a horse is left behind on a shore, and a feeling of desolation overcomes. It is the one bit of melodrama in the book which was justifiable in the moment, because the break between the Old and New Worlds, and the idea of flying through the air over water, all lend a grand mythos- what Herzog would call an 'ecstatic truth,' to the scene. All the rest of the melodrama is, by comparison, cheap, schmaltzy, and far below Hamill's usual prose and narrative standards.

On board, Cormac pals around with the Africans, and buddies up to a tribal shaman (called a babalawo) named Kongo, of all things. Once they reach New York City, the men stay in touch, and after saving the shaman's life, and losing his own, he is resurrected, and granted immortality, as long as he never leaves the island of Manhattan.

Herein the sort of contrivance that, even in a fantasy novel- which this one becomes, makes little sense, save to give the book a plot twist to keep readers reading when they otherwise might not. Why must he be confined to Manhattan, rather than be free to roam the world and hunt down the male Warrens? Simple. It would negate Hamill's desire to wax on of Gotham history. Thus, the dictates that flow organically from the tale Hamill has crafted are subverted by his own overweening desire to sing a paean to New York.

This recalls, to me, the way Toni Morrison poorly subverted her own novel Beloved, by sticking to the wan and ridiculous tale of an insane woman haunted by ghosts when she had a potentially great tale emerging about a survivor of the Andersonville Death Camp. Both writers were not confident enough to allow the novel's own evolving dictates supplant their overall initial aims. This is often manifested by heavyhanded symbolism, infortuitous plot devices- such as a deus ex machina, and other things that kybosh books that have great potential.

Even worse is some of the tin pan moralizing that the babalawo requires of the Irish swain: other than never leaving Manhattan, lest he never pass on to the Otherworld, he must make love to a woman marked with spirals in the same cave where Kongo brought him back to life. He must also actively enjoy life, love, music, women, and food. Uh….ok, cue the scary 1930s Universal film music, for this plays out like that era's idea of tribal Africans and their rituals.