Title: The Fourth Whore
Author: EV Knight
Edition: Paperback
Page Count: 224 pages
Rating: 5 / 5 ✨✨✨✨✨
Short Summary:
Kenzi Brooks watched The Scribble Man collect her brother’s soul after a hit and run when she was seven. He gave her a present that day—a lucky rabbit’s foot. Sixteen years later, she no longer believes in The Scribble Man, she believes in survival and does what she has to in the slums of Detroit. When thugs kill her mother and beat Kenzi to near death, she accidentally releases Lilith from her prison within the time-worn keychain.
And Hell hath no fury…
Lilith is out for revenge. Revenge against God, Sariel (Angel of Death and Kenzi’s Scribble Man), and all of mankind for relegating her to nothing more than a demoness for refusing to submit to her husband. She’s put together an apocalyptic plan to destroy everyone who has forsaken her. Forget the Four Horsemen, Lilith is assembling the Four Whores.
Will Kenzi rise against her to save the world and The Scribble Man or will she become The Fourth Whore?
Have you ever picked up a book without knowing too much about it, only to discover that it was exactly what you were looking for? THE FOURTH WHORE is that for me right now, and I want to thank the Night Worms organizers for hosting another super great #NightWormsBookParty, as well as Raw Dog Screaming Press & Erin Al-Mehairi for providing a review copy to our entire Night Worms review team this month – right before the book’s official launch!
I didn’t know much about this book going into it, so if you’re like me and only need to read a short mini-synopsis to entice you to purchase something, let me just tell you that it’s a feminist revenge story about the Four Horsewomen of the apocalypse with enough violence & smut to make you squirm and your skin crawl while reading. A couple of other Night Worms reviewers compared it to the show Supernatural, and I can definitely see this as a darker, more female-centric version of the show (with a lot more sex). I struggle to label it genre-wise; it has a lot going on despite its shorter page count, blending horror with fantasy elements seamlessly.
The language Knight uses throughout is so rich and lush that the gritty environments become almost real. This ability to create something so vivid from the words on a page transport the reader from the tougher neighborhoods of Detroit where Kenzi fights for something better, to the beautiful Garden from which Lilith is banished, creating the catalyst for the horrors to come. Like their situations and surroundings, the characters too seem to leap from the pages – Sariel’s weaknesses, Lilith’s hatred, Gloria’s kindness. Both major and minor characters are given distinct personalities, and although the cast is large, Knight’s abilities as an author allow their voices to shine through made each one memorable in its own way.
Some parts of this were tough to read content-wise, and I won’t shy away from warning you that if rape, violent sex, or drug abuse bother you in your fiction, this may not be the book for you. That said, my personal feelings about these things allowed me to connect on a deeper level with the story rather than put me off from it, and I found myself feeling actual anger at some of the injustices committed against some of the characters. So much of the book was realistic, despite the fantastical things that happen in it, and the anger that women feel at being used, abused, controlled, and held back is very, very real. I felt the author’s own anger in her writing, and that fury really lent itself well to the storytelling itself – such a powerful book!
Overall, I enjoyed this one so much, even if the reading experience did make me a little mad – that emotional reaction just goes to show how good the author is at her craft. It was a wild ride from beginning to end, and I found myself being drawn back to it every time I had to put the book down to deal with ‘real life stuff’. I have a feeling this one is going to put me into a book slump – it’s totally unlike anything I’ve read, and I wish there were more.
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