Book Review: Omens by Jim W. Coleman

Reading Daydreams, by Mitchell Smith, gave me the push of bravery I needed to review Omens. The latter stars a man who bites off the penises of little boys and bigger men. This doesn’t happen in a cartoonish horror type of way, but in an unsettling creepy kind of way.

I read Omens and I thought, "This is freaked-out. What are people going to think of me if I'm reading this?" Is that silly? Yeah, sure, but you haven't read the book yet, so you don't quite know what I'm talking about now, do you? Mostly I was thinking, "I can't put this in the newspaper as a review, because I'm not sure I'm ready to subject my readers to this without a seven-layer dip of warning."

But then I read the pulp-horror-mystery of Daydreams, with the scalded-off skin and cooked-banana-up-twat lead-in scene, and those apprehensions melted away. Publishers Weekly, New York Times, and a slew of newspaper blurbs weighed in with positivity. So, the fact that I liked Omens didn't mean I was insane.

See, not only can we readers feel sorry for the boys in the story, caught with their pants down in the Arizona desert, but the author guides us into feeling sorry for (well, at first) Cliff Rilek, the disillusioned, under-an-illusion, bitter biter. The horror starts in 1960 with a drunked up, bollixed up, too-incisive circumcision that 30-or-so years later gives a whole new meaning to SMS - Small-Man Syndrome. The book tries deeply to root itself in the real world—real fears, real actions, real pain—but the introduction of the supernatural is profound. The two primary elements in this area are psychic insight from new Safford Police Chief Collins, and the actions of a wannabe-werewolf, Rilek.

We see the story—ultimately a cop chasing a bad guy tale—unfold through the eyes of the hunter and the hunted, and watch their connection come closer, like a lit match and a stick of dynamite. It's a long fuse. After Rilek starts a gory killing spree in a small town, the chase bounds across eastern Arizona, from isolated sun-burned desert to isolated, snow-bound lakes. For anyone who has experienced the Arizona environment and the Arizona rains, Coleman's descriptions bring back the real life of lightning, the rain and their effect on the desert and its life: "The storm was the manifestation of a world in cardiac arrest..."

The action moves like a pile-driver, the same way Cliff wishes he could. It's a story as blunt as the blade that cut through baby Cliff's manhood. It's a story you might want to forget, but you can't. And neither can the author, who has sequels planned and half chewed-over. Coleman has a vision with Omens, and doesn't stray from the path in delivering it. He has a personal history of involving himself in crimes; not as any type of investigator, but as an observer. It shows in the details of many of the crime scenes, where he remembers to look at it from all angles as the scene plays, roughly, before our eyes.

Article Author: Temple Stark

A graphic designing wordsmith, with a decade-plus career in community journalism behind me. Take a mean photo, have a new camera, and have been riding the wave of Twitter for more than a year.

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