'Newlywed Will Battese finds himself homesick and overwhelmed after following his ambitious wife, Shannon, to New York City. When a surprise pregnancy shreds their already meagre budget, Will drops out of college and settles for work at a low-end diner. There, a small act of kindness draws the attention of Victor Degas, a man with an unsettling presence and deformed eyes. Unbeknownst to Will, Degas belongs to an ancient, sophisticated cult known as the Edens and believes Will to be the key to gaining otherworldly power.
'As the sun sets on Good Friday, Degas orchestrates a home invasion in which Will and his baby boy, Gideon, are kidnapped, leaving Shannon to join forces with an unreliable agent from the Roman Catholic Church. While Will struggles to save other innocents from the Eden parish below the city, Shannon discovers that the cult plans to use her family for an unimaginable demonic ritual, and that the Vatican may let it happen. With no one to trust but themselves, Shannon and Will must fight not only to survive, but to keep their humanity intact.'
The Cult of Eden is the first part in a new series, 'The Unrisen', but is an easily satisfying and entertaining stand alone novel too.
The book follows several members of the Battese family, as their lives are turned into a nightmare. There's Will, who's moved away from his quiet home town to live with his new wife, Shannon, in New York. Despite hating the big city Will has been trying to make a go of it with Shannon and their new baby boy, Giddeon. Despite being a great chef, Will has had to take a job working in a less than perfect restaurant in order to support his family, but is making enough to help support Shannon's higher paid job.
When Wills father, Richard, little brother Danny, and his grandfather Griff, all leave their old lives behind and decide to travel to the big city to live with Will things begin to look up for the Batrese's. However,when the family's first gathering is attacked by mysterious masked assailants the men are all captured and taken to a strange location, one where a bizarre cult needs them to perform a ritual. Now the family are left fighting for their lives.
The Cult of Eden wasn't what I was expecting from the initial premise. First of all, the book is structured quite differently that I thought it would, skipping between a number of focal characters depending on what chapter you were reading. This was used quite well for a lot of the book, and meant that the reader got to see what was happening during other events, or occasionally got extra insight into things that happened in a previous chapter, now that the focus had shifted.
However, there were a couple of times where I felt like perhaps the chapters could have been slightly better served by being shifted around in their order, because one would take the tension out of another. For example, one character was left trapped in a room with no apparent way out in the end of one chapter, but then appears at the end of the next characters chapter, revealing that they managed to get out before we see that happen. It's a small niggle, and one that only happens once or twice, but something that I'm hoping Halpin addresses in the next book.
These shifts in character focus also allow for a few surprise moments at certain interludes, where the action shifts away from the main narrative, sometimes giving us more detail into characters that are only really on the periphery for the main narrative, and in another teasing out a mystery that takes the whole book to be revealed, and seems to hint at bigger things to come in the series.
The story also managed to keep me guessing for a lot of it, as it was never clear exactly what was going to be coming next, and whilst I did expect certain things, like the cult to kidnap the family, there were so many twists and turns along the journey that a plot that could have felt like it had been done before was fresh and interesting. These twists were great when it came to the idea of the supernatural being introduced to the narrative too. There were moments where it looked like the cult were actually working with otherworldly forces, yet there was enough doubt about it to make you never sure if this was too fantastical a development to be real. The book does give you a definitive answer by the end, it foes tell you whether or not supernatural forces are real, but I certainly wont be spoiling that in the review other than say that the journey to the answer was a lot of fun.
I think it's probably worth pointing out that there is a lot of violence in the book, and Halpin doesn't shy away from describing some brutal moments in very vivid detail. This might put some people off, but I never felt that it went too far, going into the territory of 'torture porn' or anything like that, and there are definitely a lot worse horror films out there. If you get through the initial attack on the Battese family then you'll be able to get through the book as a whole, so stick with it if you can; but of course, if these parts are a little much for you I completely understand. Horror is not always for everyone, but there is a really good story mixed in with the violence here, one that is worth reading and sticking at.
The book seems to bring a lot of the Battese's story to a close come the end of the book, and whilst there are definitely threads left hanging the book would still be a satisfying read all on its own. but, this is the first part of a series, and as such not everything will be resolved in this book, and you will be left wanting to read the next one. Personally, I'm definitely interested in finding out what happens next, even if the Battese family don't play much of a part in the next instalment. Halpin has managed to craft a world that's interesting and intriguing enough to be able to carry on in new directions and explore new elements and still keep me wanting to read more. I'm certainly looking forward to finding out what happens next.
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