A human is abducted by aliens but, when they attempt to eat his soul, he turns the tables on them. Following an apprenticeship with a guru who seems to be a cross between the master in 'Karate Kid' and Yoda from 'Star Wars', the human becomes Doctor Oadwin, preying on evil people across the ages, made immortal by eating souls (you have to inhale them as they leave the dying body through the eyes, apparently). He recruits an evil nurse who reminds him of his mother as sidekick and together they champion the good by, er, killing the wicked.
If you like aliens and cannibalistic psychopaths, with some stomach-churning fight scenes, you'll love this short novel. It was narrated (3rd person omniscient, past tense) with an energy that kept the story crackling along and both the black-and-white (mostly black) characterisations and the amorality seemed appropriate to a story in which the title character is clearly criminally insane.
Selected quotes:
- "Pain growled out from his empty stomach and darted around his torso like a plague of burning cockroaches." (Ch 2)
- "Oadwins hormonal turmoil had been turned into an emotional hurricane that threatened to destabilise his fragile sanity completely." (Ch 4)
- "The soul tasted like heaven; tingles traversed his body from the tip of his nose to the ends of his toes. His eyes sparkled and his mind seemed to expand, exponentially." (Ch 6)
- "The ghosts of his past wailed their pitiful poems of misery and hate in his mind" (Ch 8)
- "fear creeping over her flesh like a slimy eel" (Ch 10)
- "The soul tasted like rainbows and iron, electricity tingled through her bones and danced through her flesh. Fresh mint seemed to flow through her mind" (Ch 13)
- "Cognitive dissonance was the price she paid for her immortality." (Ch 16)
May 2023
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