Cursed by Jeremy Shipp

ISBN: 978-1933293875
I was given this book for consideration for review by the author.

Some books are easy reads, some are emotionally harrowing, and some make you work to take the experience imbued by the author away when you close it at the end. Cursed by Jeremy C. Shipp falls very definitely into this last category.

Nick is an odd, but easy to relate to man who has reason to believe he’s been cursed as strange things start to happen in his life. By chance (or maybe not) he meets Cicely and Abby, who also seem to be cursed, and it all started on the same day. Are they cursed by the same man? And how do they stop it and get their loved ones back when they might just be the playthings of a god?

But that barely touches the surface of the story in this book. Shipp is an excellent writer, there’s no doubt, but this is neither and easy book nor one for everyone. As the story progresses a disturbing sense of complete imbalance surfaces, as the reader realizes they know almost everything about the secondary characters and nothing about Nick himself, coupled with the suspicious that these people are just completely nuts.

The difficulty of the read is in Shipp’s absolute close-mouthed approach, telling the reader what is happening in precise, list like detail, but also never allowing character nor reader a moment to guess why this is all happening, or if, indeed the character are sharing some psychosis or privy to some deeper truth. There is a divide between how the three main characters experience things and how the rest of the story world experiences them, but Shipp seems unwilling to lend “right” to one or the other or both. He chooses instead to push the story on, maintaining a sense of “what the hell” from the reader. We know, as we experience the story (because despite it’s simplistic writing approach it is experiencing it more than reading it) that both sides cannot be correct. Yet Shipp maintains proof that they are, forcing the reader to let go of their preconceived notions of storytelling and trust in him.

I was left with a feeling that in their skewed, possibly psychotic mental workings the three leads were free to somehow confront life itself, in a bodily form, particularly when they finally meet their curser and he has this to say: “I’m interested in your mind, your emotions, the whole enchilada. Your suffering is a valuable asset to me, and I don’t relish the thought of you finding a sort of nihilistic peace in oblivion.”

Shipp has, in my opinion, formed a story of life’s battering of the living, of being a brutal lover who gives and takes away with the same hand. Of kissing and smacking at the simultaneously, and for the same reason.

Cursed is not an easy read on any level (save for that it is written almost entirely as a series of lists, meta lists and listed occurrences, so technically two hundred plus pages of one to two line “paragraphs” might be considered an easy read, word count wise) but the right readers will find it worth the work.