Shadowshift
Peter Giglio
DarkFuse
June 2, 2015
Reviewed by Tim Potter
Shadowshift by Peter Giglio is a dark and, at times, brutal horror novel. It follows the Mitchell family as they deal with supernatural powers that they don’t fully understand or appreciate. Chet, the family patriarch, is a down and out petty criminal who uses his ability to support himself in lieu of working harder. How his child, Hannah, and her mother Tina deal with the choices Chet makes form the backbone of the story.
The first half of the novel is told through parallel narratives. The scenes shift from, what is is safe to assume is, the present with Hannah at age twelve and her mother Tina in Springfield, Missouri and Hannah at age six with Tina and Chet living together in Savannah, Georgia. As the reader learns what drove mother and daughter to a different state without Chet, they learn what happens to them in their new life six years on. This isn’t always effective as one story is often more interesting than the other, but Giglio does an admirable job of keeping everything flowing forward at a brisk clip.
The characters are the book’s strongest point, and it’s the investment in them emotionally that makes the book as good as it is. Chet is a great antagonist, at times frighteningly real and at other times detestably frightening. Even when immersed in the supernatural he comes off with a genuine realism. A great coming–of-age story is told through Hannah, as she grows from six to twelve years old. She’s faced with problems many can relate to: a broken family, lack of friends and coming to terms with adolescent changes. Her changes just happen to be considerably more dramatic that the average preteen. Tina, Hannah’s mother, has a satisfying character arc, as do smaller characters like Kevin, his mother and father and Hannah’s new friend Chelsea.
The only real weakness in the novel is when the story veers away from the family dynamic of Chet, Hannah and Tina. The prologue, part of the final chapter and a brief interlude in the middle of the book take Chet away from the main story, to his childhood and to a mysterious plane called the Theater of the Lost. These asides try to make some sense of the supernatural roots of the story, something that was probably better left unexplained. Luckily, these passages are brief and the reader won’t know they’ve dropped out of the main narrative until after the book draws them back in to it.
Well worth checking out, Shadowshift draws the reader in with a combination of appealing and abominable characters and a well executed plot that is as real as it is dark and bizarre.
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