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Anna Dressed in Blood (Anna, #1)

Kendare Blake

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Sep 27, 2019 Werner rated it really liked it

Shelves: supernatural-fiction

17-year-old only child Theseus [named for the legendary slayer of the Minotaur] Cassio Lowood (he prefers to be called Cas, not surprisingly :-) ) is the latest member of a long line of ancestors to wield a magic-indued dagger, called an "athame," capable of banishing ghosts from this plane of reality. His father preceded him in this calling, and was killed by a ghost when Cas was seven years old. (Not all ghosts in Blake's fictional world harm the living, but some are homicidal.) When he was 14 17-year-old only child Theseus [named for the legendary slayer of the Minotaur] Cassio Lowood (he prefers to be called Cas, not surprisingly :-) ) is the latest member of a long line of ancestors to wield a magic-indued dagger, called an "athame," capable of banishing ghosts from this plane of reality. His father preceded him in this calling, and was killed by a ghost when Cas was seven years old. (Not all ghosts in Blake's fictional world harm the living, but some are homicidal.) When he was 14, he chose to take up the athame, and in the three years since then he's been hunting and dispatching the murderous dead, with some help from his mom (a Wiccan white witch), his father's former mentor, and a few other contacts, supported by his dad's trust funds and the income from his mother's sale of herbal and occult-related products. She and he don't typically stay long in any given place. (He's also, of course, part of another long line: the literary tradition of the "occult detective," the traveling supernatural troubleshooter in the mold of Flaxman Low, Carnacki, Jules de Grandin, Silver John, etc.) His secretly-held ambition, and object of study, is to unravel the mystery behind his father's death and deal with the entity that killed him.

Our story opens in rural North Carolina, and jumps immediately into ghost-busting action; but we rapidly move to the main setting of the story, Thunder Bay in Ontario, Canada, a real-life city (pop. ca. 113,700) on the northern shore of Lake Superior. According to Cas' informant, it's home to Anna Korlov (d. 1958), a Finnish-descended 16-year-old girl whose throat was brutally slashed on the night of a high school dance. Since then, she's dismembered any of the living unlucky enough to enter her old house. But Cas quickly learns that Anna isn't your typical confused, traumatized ghost (some of whom don't even realize they're dead) lashing out at the living in fear and panic; indeed, she's unlike any spirit he's ever encountered....

This is a very fast-paced story with a lot of action, and a plot that holds some real surprises. Blake makes effective use of actual folklore, from a couple of different ethnic traditions. Her characterizations are strong, vividly-drawn, and they transcend stereotype, rather than slavishly conforming to it (I particularly liked that). She also knows that successful fiction, no matter what genre it is, has to above all provide characters the reader likes, feels for, and cares about; if we don't, the various menaces and complications of the tale won't have any meaning for us. At least for me, that challenge is met here; I cared intensely about the main characters and their fate. The mood of life-or-death danger is evoked very well and frequently here, making for a high degree of suspense. Cas' psychological baggage is realistic, and he's a believable teen (as are the other teen characters) -albeit an atypical one, because he's faced challenges and responsibilities that have forced him to mature quickly.

That raises the question, is this a YA novel? The publishers market it as one; and yes, it has teen characters at its center, and Blake conjures the high school milieu very well. But all adults have been there, too (some things never change!), and most of us can recall it easily. (I had much more in common with Thomas than I ever did with the "Trojan army;" I'm 67, and I had no trouble getting into the story and relating.) There's no sexual content, and while there's significantly more violence and gore than there is in the classic supernatural "horror" tradition, Blake doesn't wallow in it any more than she has to. But neither of those facts unfits the story for adult readers. And it's also true that the book depicts some teenage drinking, and a kind of cavalier attitude towards cutting classes (though in some cases here that's justified). More importantly, it has a great deal more bad language, most of it gratuitous (including the f-word) than I would comfortably classify as YA. IMO, many teens would like it, but I'd consider it an adult novel with teen characters; I've recommended it for supernatural fiction readers in general, and when the BC library replaces its missing copy, I plan to put the new one in Supernatural Fiction/Fantasy, not the Juvenile section.

One line of comment on this book that comes up a lot, in discussions and reviews, often as a criticism, is that it's supposedly very much influenced by the long-running TV show Supernatural (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Superna... ), which debuted in 2005. In fact, however, Blake has stated on Goodreads, in response to a question about this, that she never even started to watch the TV series until after she'd already written both the novels in the Anna series. The inspiration for the latter was entirely independent of any TV program. The frequently-invoked parallel is that Cas is a traveling ghost hunter, while the Winchester brothers are also traveling hunters of supernatural beasties, and in both cases they're taking over the task from a deceased father. But the idea of the "occult detective" has been a common theme in supernatural fiction, as noted above, for a long time; and the premise that it could run in multiple generations of a family is hardly so outre as to demand literary dependence. (Guido Henkel's Jason Dark is another example.) Dean is such a common first and last name that its use here as a last name for a minor character hardly proves that it's copied from Dean Winchester. And that the TV series also has a character nicknamed "Cas" (though he's not a ghost hunter, and is named Castiel, not Cassio) is not convincingly demonstrated to be anything more than a coincidence. Moreover, the differences are more marked than the similarities. The TV series has two brothers as hunters, and the sibling relationship is an important part of the series dynamic. That's completely absent here. The Winchester brothers' mother was killed when they were small children. Cas' mom is very much alive, and an important part of his life and of the book. The whole garbled, pseudo-Christian "angels vs. demons" mythos that took over the series is absent here, too; and the central role of the athame here is absent from the TV show. More differences could be pointed out, but those suffice to show the dissimilarity.

Unlike some supernatural fiction, this is not a novel that's strong on religious or spiritual content; indeed, that's wholly absent. (Cas doesn't know where the dead go when they leave this plane of existence, and he's not interested in finding out or speculating about it.) One important plot point (and a minor one, too, but that's a quibble) poses a logical problem that's basically just glossed over. In one case, Blake refers to a character saying, in a prior chapter, something that in fact someone else said. And the unnecessary bad language (though not all the characters use it), was a detriment. All of this cost the book a star. But it's still a very powerful, evocative read (and a quick read, that will have you compulsively turning pages!) that thrusts its characters into a situation where they have to face moral dilemmas and emotionally challenging choices. They experience strong emotions and the reader does too (in that respect, allowing for the differences in style that two centuries have wrought, it's as quintessentially a Romantic novel as those I've read from Scott or Radcliffe). There's a very real, high-stakes conflict between clearly contrasted good and evil, and it will take great courage for good to triumph. For these reasons, it earned four stars from me.

As a concluding note, the Canadian setting made me wonder if Kendare [the e is apparently sounded] Blake is Canadian. She's not, and I couldn't discover a Canadian connection; she was born in Korea, but raised by an adoptive family in Minnesota. The flavor of the book, though, is realistic --you feel that, yes, this Is how the real world would be if it were invaded by the ghostly. ...more

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Aug 21, 2013 Jennifer Thorn rated it it was amazing

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