Title: Mud
Author: E.J. Wenstrom
Date: 2016
Publisher: City Owl; republished as e-book by Book Funnel
Quote: "His fingers wrap around it. The force of the box's curse takes over and my arms reach for him."
Adem is a chthonus--like a golem, only not Jewish. His vividly imagined world of "Three Realms" is intentionally outside the Judeo-Christian tradition. Adam wants a soul, but doesn't have one. He is made from mud for the purpose of carrying a little box, for centuries, killing anyone who touches the box, until he can deliver the box to a soul in the realm of the dead.
The box will bring her back to life--painfully. And when she comes back to life, she'll be very angry about her whole situation. The demigod who built Adem to reclaim her was her lover, but his love had become corrupted by selfishness and painful to her. She'd committed suicide to escape him.
The cosmology of this world has been carefully constructed in a way that, to Christian readers, is sure to feel all wrong. Wenstrom treated the Judeo-Christian worldview as a fictional trope on which she needed to put her own original spin. If that doesn't turn you off (it does me, just a bit) this is a well crafted book, part of a series you might enjoy.
Or not. Content warning: lots of violence, onstage, much of it committed by the narrator; lots of vividly imagined pain. There may be some artistic, symbolic meaning why we have to watch Rona begging ever more desperately for water for hours before someone tells Adem that humans can't drink salt water, which is what he's been bringing to her...if that sort of scene bothers you, read something else.
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