“Four and Twenty Blackbirds” is a modern treatment of the Southern Gothic genre, and it’s sophisticated for what it is: unashamed, straight-up trade paperback genre fiction.
Eden Moore has always had the ability to see ghosts. When she was young, she was often visited by the specters of three African women who acted as her protectors. Unfortunately, ghosts aren’t much help to a ten year old girl when she’s being chased through the Tennessee woods by a crazy, bible-thumping gunman, and it gets worse when it turns outs that the teenage shooter, Malachi Dufresne, is Eden’s cousin – Part of a white, southern-gentry branch of the family that had been kept entirely secret from her.
Eden accepts the silence of her only relatives, her maternal aunt and uncle, until Malachi escapes from prison and shoots a woman, mistaking her for Eden. She decides that if her aunt won’t tell her the truth, she’ll discover it herself, starting in the only two places she knows: The abandoned mental institution where her 16-year-old mother died giving birth to her and in the mansion of the spiteful Eliza Dufresne, Malachi’s ancient Great-Aunt who knows exactly who, or what, Eden is.
The writing in this debut novel is solid. Her words are confident, colorful and to-the-point. Her dialogue is usually pretty realistic and anything that sounded stilted to me I just chalked up to a southern speech pattern I simply hadn’t yet encountered in a Reese Witherspoon movie.
Eden Moore is a familiar, but interesting, protagonist. Everyone knows a smart, sort of bohemian hipster who doesn’t take school too seriously and goes to a lot of poetry readings don’t they? Part of what makes Eden so likeable is that she doesn’t take much too seriously and it keeps the tone of the book on the light side. Unusual for a genre that depends on building suspense, but that fact that Eden was more level-headed than your typical gothic heroine – a trembling hysteric with an inexplicable side of kung-fu – was a bit refreshing and kept the focus squarely on the plot.
In spite of some holes – some general areas where things just seemed too easy – the plot is quite good. The first third of the novel focuses on Eden’s childhood: the ghost women, Malachi’s murder attempt and a strange incident at summer camp, which turned out to be both less and more important than it at first seemed. Then Malachi escapes, opens fire in a café and the plot speeds up as Eden digs for answers in her very complicated family tree. The last third of the book flies by as Eden and a Catholic priest with a shotgun race to a Florida swamp to destroy an evil, undead sorcerer responsible for psychically murdering Eden’s family and stop him from raising an even more powerful wizard before the passing of a 160 year deadline.
The price of such tight plotting is that character development gets shifted to the side. Characters in the book are clear and distinct, but lack nuance. Priest doesn’t take the time to build up detailed character traits and most of her characters fit in a set of very general molds. Clues to their characters come in the form of dialogue or plot driven action and all are colored by Eden’s assumptions. One character that deserved more was Harry, Eliza’s butler/undercover gun-toting priest, as we are never told that much about him other than when and why he came to work for Eliza.
“Four and Twenty Blackbirds” is a fun novel. In spite of all the blood, gore, witchcraft and dead people, Priest keeps everything light and entertaining. Once the plot gets going, it’s hard to put down. It’s the kind of thing that would make great summer reading – especially because Priest has written two sequels. Instead of lounging on the beach with some standard beach-centric chick-lit set on the oh-so romantic New England coast (we live that, so who cares?) head south for the summer and get lost in a gator ridden swamp, counting four and twenty blackbirds.