Syriacide - 1, #1 - E-book - ePub

A fleet of SUVs park outside an abandoned apartment block in the besieged Aleppo, off loading groups of ISIL terrorists who storm a building. No one is there, except one man, the Syriacide blogger, and treacherous, blood thirsty and merciless killers. He is desperate to escape, as he tries to save himself from live gun battles. But how to do this is poses the greatest challenge of his life?"Syracide is a book that focuses more on building tension than on prose, and drags the reader on a ride that doesn't ease up until the very end.
We start with the immolation of a holy man and the violence only escalates from there. Written in a very real and journalistic style, Mulvihill takes us on a trip through a hell that feels all the more real for the direct and simple style that he writes in. The prose reminds me of Crane or Thomas Harris, straightforward and without frills. Yet it is this home brewed style that makes the horror palpable, and gives life to scenes of almost utter depravity.
The story functions as the blogged notes of an unnamed writer who is living in Syria and watching the deterioration of Aleppo into religious anarchy and politically motivated violence. We see everything from the writer's perspective, which alternates between journalistic aloofness and existential ponderings about the nature of suffering and evil. Our narrator documents the demolishing of Aleppo, all while dodging insurgents and burying the bodies of loved ones in a futile attempt to inject some dignity into the chaos.
The plot is very bare, and focuses on our narrator's attempts to record how the lives of his friends and family are affected by the disintegration of order in the middle east. Interviews and slice-of-life meanderings give way to extremely intense scenes of violence and horror as everything descends into madness, eventually forcing the narrator to leave the middle east altogether. Mulvihill has captured something very real here, something that is both human and exceedingly horrific.
This book is less of a story in the traditional sense, and more a wake-up call to the west about what its imperialistic tendencies and interference in foreign affairs have wrought. None of us is as civilized as we think we are, and the reality of social decay is always just around the corner. Overall, I think those who can stomach the violence and engage with the book's break-neck pace will find some real gems in the narrative."Andrew Hodges Horror Novelist