Cursed Review

How do you define Jeremy C. Shipp's Cursed? Is it supernatural horror? A thriller? I don't really know, but I do know one thing: it's delightfully weird. Cursed tells the story of Nick, a recovering alcoholic with severe abandonment issues and self-destructive tendencies. Oh yeah, he also gets slapped in the face once a day like clockwork. Read on for the full review.

Nick is convinced he's cursed. Every day somebody slaps him. There's no way around it; even when he barricades himself in his room with his blind roommate Gordon, events unfold that lead to Gordon slapping him before midnight.

But then Nick learns he's not the only one. Cicely his weird acquaintance from the supermarket is also cursed. She has to keeping holding a certain tennis ball because she was told it is actually the world. If she drops it the world's going to end. Sure it might not be true, but would you take that chance and drop the ball?

As the story continues Nick and Cicely team up with more people who have been cursed. They fight against the mastermind that cursed them, a mastermind that's impossible to find and seems to know their every move.

That's enough of a plot summary for now. Let's examine the characters in a little more detail. Right away I noticed that Cursed is a first person narrative from Nick's point of view. However, Shipp mixes things up. Just like the strange, experimental quality to the humor, the narrative itself mirrors that. The story is told in the first person present tense which is something I don't see very often.

Also as a coping mechanism, Nick makes lists, both physical and mental. This manifests itself in the text as the majority of the action is told in list form as Nick catalogues what's happening around him. This both enhances and hinders the text. On the one hand it's interesting to see Nick's neuroses physically affecting the text, but on the other hand it gets a little tedious and saps some of the impact from the action. Still it's an experiment and really I can't say either way what the ultimate result is. I suppose it will just come down to personal taste; I wouldn't want to read every single novel in this style, but it does provide a refreshing change of pace.

Cicely is another strange character; they seem to be Shipp's specialty. The only way I can describe her sense of humor is off-beat. When she and Nick hang out every line of dialogue becomes a joke about some outlandish thing usually involving: monsters, aliens, Smurfs, yard gnomes, anthropomorphic cutlery, and other things. As a follower of Shipp on Twitter I instantly felt at home among the weird references. I wonder how much of Cicely's humor is an extension of Shipp himself or how much of his Twitter stream/persona is based on Cursed. Musings about Shipp's source of humor aside, I can see readers going either way when it comes to the Nick and Cicely scenes. Some will enjoy the humor (like me) and others will find it tedious as it occurs almost constantly for the majority of the book.

Some of the other minor characters don't have as much personality as Nick, Cicely, or even Abby--a third curse victim who joins the cursed club a little later on. Characters like Nick's sister Nadia, her husband Greg, and their young daughter Svetlana seem to drop in and out. Svetlana is supposed to enhance the reader's sympathy for Nick because of how cute they are together, but they don't get enough scenes together to really drive home that emotional bond.

Despite these minor complaints, it's entertaining (in a morbid sort of way) to watch Nick, Cicely, and Abby struggle against their respective curses. You root for them as the curses are slowly destroying their lives. And by the end of the novel you realize that it's become less about the curse and more about their individual struggles for redemption against their own personal demons.

Even after writing this review, I'm no closer to classifying Cursed. It contains believable human struggles, but  it also has things that fall outside our normal definitions of reality. So does that make it fantasy? Or perhaps to bring up a genre I haven't really thought about since college, magical realism? It really doesn't matter. Shipp's done something special. He's combined weirdness, humor, and horror all in the same package. So unless you want the yard gnome army to come besiege your house, I suggest you give Cursed a read.