The story is carried out within the Inverted Theater, which exists exterior of time and may solely be visited whereas one is dreaming. An unnamed spectator sits within the viewers and is advised that this story is a love story.
It is summer time, because it all the time is within the Old Country, and one fateful night time, the all-powerful emperor goes to go to his imprisoned spouse, the Moon god, for the primary time in a long time. She promptly plasters his viscera in opposition to the wall of her cell and flees, hunted by her eldest son, the First Terror. She is accompanied by Jun, a soldier she swayed to her trigger; Keema of the Daware Tribe, a younger, one-armed warrior tasked by his commander with delivering a spear to a lady on the coast; and a deformed tortoise telepathically linked to all its kin. While gods scheme, armies mass and the empire crumbles from its heart, the destiny of the world relies on two younger males, an animal and a god whose energy is waning.
The Spear Cuts Through Water is fantastically, lovingly crafted. Simon Jimenez’s writing is dense and poetic, suffused with a sun-bleached magnificence that’s wholly at odds with the nightmarish and ugly world it depicts. The Spear Cuts Through Water is, to be clear, a really disturbing guide. Turning every web page is extra prone to reveal an abattoir than the rest—albeit one painted in mythic prose. But scattered all through are moments of peace and realization, temporary tableaux through which the love story that was promised peeks out. Despite this being a story of gods and demons, of psychic tortoises and a Moonless sky, Jimenez by no means forgets the pair of people struggling alongside at its coronary heart.
Jimenez veers unpredictably between worlds, interweaving Keema and Jun’s epic journey with vignettes from the unnamed spectator’s life in our personal actuality, one with absentee fathers and college bullies and bloody wars throughout an ocean. Against this backdrop, the story of the Moon god and the emperor appears allegorical, like there’s a message someplace inside the sweltering, limitless summer time of the Old Country. But Jimenez doesn’t present his hand immediately. Rather, he pulls the reader alongside, coaxing them via a thicket of ghoulish horrors with the promise of an ethical and a which means to be delivered by the time the curtain falls. And ultimately, he doesn’t disappoint.
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