Fires Rising Leisure Fiction Horror Book Review

Fires Rising is the latest novel by Michael Laimo, is another Good vs. Evil type book. The back states that the church is supposed to be renovated but in actuality it is being destroyed and the protagonist, Father Pilazzo was in a sense being evicted. The main plot is follows the unearthing of items found buried in the church leading to a Good vs. Evil struggle and the gathering of sides. There are a couple side plots involving Father Pilazzo’s current predicament and the homeless gathered in the church that may have stumbled onto something.


This fits the horror genre because it contains gore and a horror type storyline. There is nothing really scary here and the writing is ok. I really had to push myself to continue reading this so that I could get to the end. There were many times that my eyes would get heavy and I would start nodding off and that was during the action parts. The prose of the novel was quite jumpy. There were a few parts that really moved and parts that somewhat flowed and then those places that I had to drudge my way through. The characters were not bad. I did find myself more concerned with the homeless than I did with the main protagonist. The climax kept well with the character development of Father Pilazzo, but what he does in the end felt forced by the story so that it could end in a certain way.


Some criticisms


- “Evil that promises man the end of days,” was a repetitive phrase that was overused. Just seeing those words so many times throughout the story really detracted from it.


- The main protagonist’s character was just 2 dimensional and really didn’t seem to have much of a place in the story until the end and then it felt as if the plot was pushing him along to a chosen goal.


- The fact that I had to push myself to finish reading it. The story was average and the writing was less than I expected.


Some positives


- The homeless characters felt more natural and I began to care more for them and found myself rooting more for them.


- A lot of the similes that Mr. Laimo used were just great. If there is one thing that Mr. Laimo has a knack for, it is using the appropriate similes through his work even though he did use one of them twice.


- This is the one that Mr. Laimo did not go overboard and bore me with gore details. In this one, he used the right amount to make the story really gruesome, but not in a way that it detracts from the story because you are reading just pages and pages of gore.


Overall, this story just didn’t do it for me. I just couldn’t wait to get it over with so that I could say that I was finally done. There was just not enough oomph to it. This is something that I would recommend only to those die hard G vs. E horror fans that love gore, and even then I only barely recommend it.