Posts tagged Book Reviews

                                                         ianweir.net

     Daniel O Thunder is a book I discovered on display in the new releases at the public library. I was initially attracted to the cover of the book, the one with the devil head. There is an alternate book cover, which is probably a UK edition but I’m not sure, that is pink and appears to have a picture of an English gent walking with a cane, like the Lord Sculthorpe character in the book, and I don’t think I would have been as attracted to the book had it been the edition at the library. But it wasn’t just the devil’s head art that sucked me in, to be perfectly clear, the name Daniel O Thunder has a certain super hero quality to it and I had to see just what it was all about.

     The plot synopsis describes the novel as being set in the slums of 1851 Dickensian London. O Thunder is a prizefighter with a devastatingly powerful right hook called The Hammer Of Heaven. His religion is to protect the poor, weak, and misguided from the ruin of reckless abandon that he tends to attribute to the presence of the Devil, and when made present, Daniel flies into action to cleanse the afflicted of the unholy spirit in a physical way. You get the idea that O Thunder is directly attacking the Devil every time this happens since it is typically accompanied by a great, rousing, holy speech that asks onlookers to forgive the offender and put the blame on the Devil. I also got the impression, that every time Daniel goes into one of these impromptu sermons, he speaks as loud as possible believing The Devil to be

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