Book Review: A Black and Endless Sky by Matthew Lyons (2022)
Keylight Books
After a drawn-out divorce that ends with a whimper, Jonah Talbot leaves San Francisco to return to his hometown of Albuquerque. It’s a humbling situation that many will experience at some point: the recognition that a thing you’ve invested in, gave yourself to, trusted and loved, is no longer going to give back to you or be part of your life. There are no yesterdays to change, or efforts that can be made now that the hour has passed; you’re going into your future without something you’ve put a large part of yourself into, and you’re not getting that part back.
It starts the novel on a bleak note, and it’s one the story will echo for the remainder of this tale. This is not a tale where things come easy.
Jonah is driving back in the company of his estranged sister, Nell, who was his closest confidant and partner in crime before he abruptly moved to the coast more than a decade before. They’re taking the long road back to New Mexico in Nell’s beater car, perhaps looking for each other as much as what comes next for them as individuals.
It doesn’t take long for trouble to find them. Stopping at a dive bar in the fictional town of Broghton, California, they run afoul of the 48 Coffin motorcycle club, a shit-kicking, ragtag gang led by a Vietnam vet who is probably never going to even the score he’s been keeping with the world. Over the span of a few drinks, Jonah and his sister become mortal enemies of the 48 Coffin, and the outlaws intend to follow them as far as they’ll run.
While coke-snorting bikers are a problem, a far greater danger is something that crawled out of an abandoned industrial site in the middle of the desert. Something older than all the works of man, and it has been locked away for a very long time. Unfortunately for Jonah Talbot, this antediluvian monstrosity has developed a sudden and mysterious attachment to his sister.
From there, Jonah and Nell are left scrambling to finish the thousand-mile return to Albuquerque, facing dangers both of this world and beyond it. Along the way, there’s a woman named Anna, whose faith in the Almighty has roots that go back generations, and whose tattoo-covered arms are as strong as her conviction that evils like the one fixated on Nell must be confronted.
Riding with The Ghost
A Black and Endless Sky is a gritty, frantic sojourn through a lot of dark territory. Filled with well-written hard-luck characters and some sharp writing, it’s the kind of novel that gets the attentive reader interested in the author as well as the novel. It’s a refreshing read bereft of the formulaic, MFA-honed prose that seems to feature in 80% of the things being published in genre fiction today.
From the top, the characters are the strongest element of the novel. Jonah, Nell, and the human antagonists they encounter all feel like real, lived-in people with histories, life experience, and the sense that they would continue just as they are off-page. Terry, the biker gang leader, was particularly effective for his role in the story, and it’s nice to see this kind of layered villain presence in a modern novel. Something in Lyons’s style and structure is distantly reminiscent of the 1980s horror powerhouses, and I mean this in the best way possible.
The novel as whole is harder to judge. This is one of those stories that does enough things right that, even if key elements are unsatisfying or weak, most readers should find something that they can readily appreciate. I don’t expect it to see a great deal of one-star reviews…but neither will this be a lot of reader’s best of the year unless they’re specifically looking at fiction about the American southwest.
I felt the novel often rode the rail between effectiveness and failure, as the narrative spent a bit too much time on character relationships in the form of sibling spats and rough-shod alliances through its middle stretch, then tried to flesh out the mythology of the supernatural creature in the end, partly squandering both elements of the book. In the end, I think Lyons manages to balance the acts of his story remarkably well and succeed in crafting a solid novel, but there are definite moments when it feels like the excitement is starting to slide.
The Abyss Stares Back
Without spoiling too much, I really struggled with the character of Anna, whose goals and the motivations behind her decision-making always felt a bit muddled, half-sketched. She’s a different character in the first third of the novel before pivoting thereafter, and this is a touch jarring as we get chapters from her perspective early in the book. When inside a character’s head, readers expect a certain degree of motivational transparency, and Anna colors outside those lines by going in a different direction after meeting the Talbots.
Speculating on author intent is part of what makes fiction fun, and I suspect Lyons may have dropped her into the story without knowing exactly where he wanted to take her until the eventual path presented itself. That, or she may have been folded in a particular direction when other characters weren’t proving up to the task. Either way, she’s the problematic cast member that never quite finds a place in my assessment.
The supernatural horror also didn’t quite hit for me, and I think this is because Lyons pulled the curtain back quite a bit and then closed it quickly. What I mean by that is readers get some detail on the supernatural evil–a physical-metaphysical description and some wonderfully written setpieces about how this intersects with human souls, but all that we have on this at the end of the novel could still be summed up in one sentence. We don’t learn anything specific about the origin, motivation, or history of this creature, but it’s teased that this being has such things.
I think an author in this situation either needs to do far more or almost nothing–those are the two roads that work in literature of this tripe. I think we can all understand the former, but the latter is best embodied in a Stephen King book whose name escapes me, but there’s a dangerous monstrosity referred to only as ‘the thing with the endless piebald side.’ That’s such a creepy description, and even though the title and plot of the mediocre King book has escaped me, that line hasn’t. If you want a Lovecraft-tier horror in your book, I think you have to be all in or purposefully obtuse.
Closing the Gate
A Black and Endless Sky is an uneven story, at times doing things as good or better than most of Lyons’s contemporaries. I think the core group of characters is one of the best-realized I’ve read in fiction over the past few years, and Lyons didn’t waste any page space with extraneous cast members; the central cast fits on one hand, and the few extras that need to move to a second all serve a ready purpose.
Writing novels isn’t easy, especially today when there can be multiple stakeholders affecting the development of a story long before it’s finished. I’m not sure if that applies in this case, but there’s something decidedly askew here, though it doesn’t quite derail A Black and Endless Sky.
The greatest praise I can offer at this moment is that, while I didn’t love the novel, I do really like the writer, and I think he’ll have much better works in the future. He has the talent, originality, and instincts to be an exceptionally good horror author, it just didn’t quite hang together this time out.
Eager to see what you do next, Matt.
Verdict: 6.5/10
Strengths
Great characters, and well-written
Lovely setting for this kind of horror
The mix of worldly and otherworldly horrors is very effective, especially since these forces don’t form silly alliances
Good, original style from Lyons
Weaknesses
Motivations of one particular plot character, Anna, feel erratic
Story oddly feels abridged, like an act is missing
Wanted either more or less about the supernatural evil; right now it feels half-baked
You can pick up a copy on Amazon, Barnes and Noble, or preferably, an independent bookstore in your community.
You may also like: Desperation, The Outwaters,
