The Devil and the Dark Water

This book was one of the worst I\’ve ever read. Clearly Turton was a one hit wonder, with his 7 1/2 Deaths success (which was a very good book, but mainly because of it\’s novelty). There are SO many horribly bad things about this book. I wish I could list them all… — The unbearable Sherlockinsh psychic cliches (\”I see there\’s yellow on your shoe… clearly you had a sandwich, which means you [insert a bunch of other random deductions] and therefore you must be a professional boxer.\” \”What? wow! how did you know that!\”) — Apparently the totally protestant and Calvinist United Provinces who outlawed and banished all Catholicism is now filled with…. Catholics? With Rosaries? And who say \”Mass\”? And have the sacrament of Confession…? All things that would have caused a person in the United Provinces to be severely punished, banished, or burned at the stake. This is just insultingly lazy on the part of the author. He literally could have read ONE single paragraph from any article or encyclopedia entry on religion in this era and culture and avoided this. It\’s such a drastically erroneous oversight that it hugely impacts the believability of the fictional world the author is trying to immerse us in. This isn\’t one of those \”slight details\” that only anal people care about. This is the equivalent of a fiction novel taking place in 1950s Soviet Moscow, and all the inhabitants of the Kremlin are Libertarian Capitalists and attend Muslim Mosques on their lunch breaks. The whole \”it\’s not a religious or historical novel\” excuse simply doesn\’t work here. — The Cliche and absolutely absurd Scooby-Doo style ending is simply insulting to the reader\’s intelligence. The masks are ripped off and main characters were literally and randomly the opposite of themselves the entire time. Wow… how convenient and \”shocking\”. Yeah… shocking… that\’s the word the Sheep will use when they praise the \”twists\” at the end. –The revelation at the end that this entire multi-week elaborate and incredibly complex impossible charade made up of systems of systems and relying on hundreds of perfect tiny little variables, all of which would fail if one tiny thing had not gone to plan was all undertaken just so that the culprits could deal with a person \”a certain way that would make them remember something\” is just plain dumb and, again, insulting to the reader. –The fact that the evil geniuses who put hundreds of lives (including innocent women and children) at risk and caused a lot of deaths are suddenly flipped into being the good guys and the protagonists who lived through it all suddenly forgive them and smirk about their absurd plans for more adventures in the future… just painfully dumb. — The book is riddled with inconsistencies and contradictions from one chapter to the next: The guy with one eye suddenly has two eyes at one point… the guy with one hand has two at one point… a couple of the 7 ships sail ahead without permission before nightfall while theirs is anchored, but hours later at night the author forgets this and they\’re now talking about all 7 lanterns being visible plus an 8th… a retelling of an incident in europe in which a man was almost wrongfully executed but saved because Sammy rode up on a horse with the evidence in hand just in time, in front of the man about to be executed… is later retold but this time Sammy did NOT arrive in time and the wrongfully accused had to flee… there were so, so many little mistakes and contradictions like this… I should have written them all down) –The main \”hidden clue\” that the entire plot and mystery hinges on is kept on something in plain sight but the characters are artificially made to ignore it or dismiss it. –The old cliche of \”the novel takes place in an old era, but all the main characters are internally \”woke\” young people from the 2020s and think and believe all the things people from 2020 believe, morally, socially, politically, philosophically, even scientifically and medically\”. This happens a lot in low quality writing and it\’s absolutely insulting and amateurish. –Piggy-backing on the last point, the \”unenlightenedness\” of the era is vastly over-exaggerated and painfully inaccurate. Snobbish \”enlightened\” people have a tendency to fabricate overkill fantasies about gullible people believing in God or the Devil therefore descending into a frenzy in which entire towns kill each other due to superstitions, when in fact these things were almost unheard of. Apparently if a woman displays brilliance, or good ideas she\’s hated and beaten and potentially put to death. Yeah… that\’s definitely the norm. Stupid evil patriarchal males. Sorry but it\’s all just too cliche. –Lot\’s of magical \”potions\” that can cure and do amazing things, cuz \”science\” and alchemy. –Characters are painfully dull and 2-dimensional. –The tendency to far over-exaggerate the evil of the main antagonist in stupidly cartoonish ways is always a sign of an amateur who has no idea how to make real characters. –A very strange bizarre instance in which the book which had been moving at about a chapter per \”in-story\” hour was suddenly put into fast forward for an entire two-week period of \”running from a storm\” in which apparently nothing happened and the characters didn\’t get anywhere in unravelling the mystery… in two weeks. And suddenly we just pick up where we left off. Just bizarre. — Grammatical errors. Not a huge deal, but it adds to the pile. — The pure stupidity of some of the methods revealed at the end that were used to fake the spiritual experiences (yeah… they drilled holes that nobody noticed… that\’s how they all heard voices in their heads…\” c\’mon! It\’s not just thin, it\’s actually offensively insulting to the reader. There was so much more wrong with this novel. So, so much. I should have kept a log while reading through it all. There are at least a dozen other bullet points I could list here but I\’ve forgotten them. I understand that a lot of the positive reviewers were fanboys of his first book, 7 1/2 Deaths (which also had an idiotic scooby doo style ending) and they feel emotionally bound to write praises for this one because of the \”shocking twists\” but please, think carefully before doing so. An 8 year old could have come up with these kinds of twists. A book needs to be more than that. And above all a book needs to respect the reader, not insult their intelligence. Fiction suffers overall when readers give authors a free pass because of \”the halo effect\” they earned from a previous (and admittedly good) novel. We need to hold authors to a higher standard. This kind of writing lowers that standard, not to mention threatens to lower the collective IQ of fiction readers in general if we all lie to ourselves and heap praises where praises aren\’t deserved. I rarely write amazon reviews. But this one was so painfully bad and insulting to the reader that I had to. I realize this review will not be popular among the sheep. Please… don\’t waste your time. Avoid this book.

The Devil and the Dark Water by Stuart Turton is a historical nautical mystery that takes an Agatha Christie plot and adds the devil. The plot has so many twist and turns that all make sense. The novel is a fun who done it, with so many suspects that will make you head spin. The standouts for me is the plot, however crazy it gets there\’s always a plausible reason and character work is so good giving all 20 supporting characters their unique voices who all have their own motives and actions. A quick plot for The Devil and the Dark Water is what if a Sherlock like character was in chains and locked away and his Watson like compatriot who is a sympathetic giant that is more of a bodyguard than a problem solver had to solve a supernatural the crime. This is Stuart Turton\’s second novel after the excellent 7 1/2 Deaths of Evelyn Hardcastle that was best described as Agatha Christie on crack! I rarely buy new books when they first come out, but based on his strong debut I did and I was rewarded with a well thought out who done it. The story did not blow me away like The 7 1/2 deaths of Evelyn Hardcastle did, which was my the number one book I read last year, but this is a great book that is easily in my top ten of this year. The Plot: Samuel Pipps is the world\’s greatest detective in 1634, who has been imprisoned and taken to a ship setting sail for Amsterdam to serve time for his crimes, what ever thy are. Arent Hayes is Samuel\’s loyal bodyguard determined to protect him and prove his innocence, but before he can do that he has to stop a devil that boarded the transport ship. A leper warns the people boarding the Saaradam that Old Tom/ The Devil is a board this ship as he burns himself alive. When the leper is seen to they find his tongue had been severed and could not talk. Arent finds people willing to help but never knows who to trust as ghost and phantom boats lead to murder plot. What I Liked: Really well written characters, both main and side. I was never confused with characters and there is an awful lot of them. The plot is really captivating and dealing with all the elements on a boat which is. character in it\’s self. The twist are very layered, I did not guess who the killer or killers was, and was guessing back and forth until it was revealed. That for me is a true sign of a great mystery. Women are written very well and hold there own being very clever at a time when they did not have power. Arent\’s character really grew on me and you can\’t help but root for him solving the mystery. It\’s great to see a big character not dumb who is still a gentle giant but a smart one. The going to the bathroom and what they wiped with on a ship at the time is pretty horrifying. The way the sailors are described – They’re only on this ship because they’d be hanged anywhere else. What I Disliked: The story was always interesting, but it took a little bit for it to really get going. The after the climax ending felt unfinished, I felt the characters would definitively decide what was going to happen next, it left it mostly closed but there was still a crack that was left unclosed. Recommendations: Check out the work of Stuart Turton great characters, really clever plot twist, that will have you guessing who done it until the end. The Devil and Dark Water is less confusing than the 7 1/2 Deaths of Evelyn Hardcastle which was the main criticism for people who did not like it. This book is a lot more accessible and told in a more traditional mystery way than Hardcastle. I rated The Devil and the Dark Water by Stuart Turton 5 out of 5 stars. It is a little too soon to call Turton the king of new mystery, but he\’s off to a great start I eagerly anticipate his next work. I have rated all his works 5 out of 5 stars.

I knew this book was going to fall short of expectations within the first 30 pages, when the author misunderstood the concept of a dowry as something a rich man pays a poor father to marry their beautiful daughter. If that doesn’t bother you then you may enjoy this book. If it does, then be warned this also reads like a young adult novel, with painfully predictable characters (the children are prodigies, the noblemen arrogant and inadequate, etc) and absurd deus ex machina solutions to every puzzle. The dialogue is exasperating to read, the characters hackneyed, their behaviour ridiculous within the historical context. Thoroughly disappointing, as the promise of a literary detective novel on a 17th century Dutch East Indiaman sounded wonderful.

Outstanding books are rare, but even more rare are books this breathtakingly poor. I hate to trash any author – so let\’s say this is not a trashing of the author but of his editor and publisher. How the hell could they allow a manuscript to be published in this state? Forget completely the clanging historical inaccuracies (who cares, it\’s fiction), and just focus on the pathetically clunky storytelling, the risible characters (especially the women, who are described almost exclusively by their hair – blonde rivers, cascading curls, blah blah Jesus Christ this is beyond belief blah) and the bafflingly bad and and often nonsensical writing – eg a character (woman, natch) pulls a brush through her hair like \”a carp swimming up a river\” – ???? One of the big clue reveals in the \”mystery\” is, wait for it… an ANAGRAM. The sheer stupidity of the whole plot rendered me speechless. I read through to the end in a desperate attempt to see if the book could redeem itself at all, offer even the tiniest particle of believability or surprise. But: no. Suffice it to say that the denouement hinges on **SPOILER ALERT** smuggling a dwarf in a barrel (seriously), people pretending to be drugged (cue lots of \”staggering\”), the two people who look uncannily alike turning out to be related, the woman who never comes out of her room, refuses ever to be seen and bangs and saws things in the middle of the night turning out to be the culprit, and the mysterious cargo smuggled onto the boat under a shroud of secrecy being… TREASURE. Yes, treasure. Oh, and the criminal was able to climb up and down the hull of the boat because, guess what?, there had been a ladder built in. There\’s a serious moral point though, as it turns out that burning people as witches is bad. Who\’d have thought it. You heard it here, peeps: the 17th century witch hunts totally like sucked. You think of all the talented authors who have revealed the difficulty they\’ve had in getting their work published – this book is an insult to all of them, and to Bloomsbury\’s readers, really.

I realise that giving this book only two stars will put me in a tiny minority as am sure it will get the same approbation that The Seven Deaths did. That too was a book I found very clever and intriguing but this one? Certainly clever but full of deeply unpleasant characters – apart from Arent – and a story that was convoluted and an ending that beggared belief. I did read it through as wanted to see how it would turn out in spite of beginning to dislike it which does indicate the skill of the writer but doubt if I will want to read another. Shame really as his notes suggest someone with humour and warmth – a pity the books don\’t reflect this!

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