What do you get when you combine time travel, travel between worlds, Egyptian tombs, vampires, and the Wild West? The answer, my friends, is the latest novel from Melissa Marr. And as eclectic as it sounds, it works. Mostly.
Kitty and Jack, a brother and sister from a rough Western town, have spent almost thirty years in the Wasteland, an alien world full of strange and often dangerous creatures. They don't know how or why they were brought here, but at least they're not alone; others like them from different times and places have been mysteriously transported to the Wasteland as well. The natives don't go out of their way to bother them, but neither are they an accepted part of the community. The only thing that the Arrivals all seem to have in common is that each of them, intentionally or not, has killed someone before in their lives.
Kitty and Jack look after their fellows as well as they can, while trying to steer them away from Ajani, an Arrival who exploits the Wasteland and its native people for personal gain and pursues Kitty with a disturbing singlemindedness. Tensions between Kitty and Jack's small group and Ajani have always been high, but when Chloe is suddenly swept into the Wasteland from our modern day, her presence changes everything and will lead to a final showdown with Ajani and his empire.
Let me first say that this is a really good story. It's simple, it's very creative, it involves lots of action and romance that doesn't feel smutty; the plot progression is so smooth that I didn't even notice its movement until I was already being swept along with it. The story doesn't really get started until Chloe shows up though, and so the first part of the story (which takes place in the Wasteland) was a little bit directionless. It set up a few important things, like Kitty and Jack's personalities and Kitty and Edgar's relationship, and the unusual way in which death works for the Arrivals (sometimes, six days after being killed, Arrivals wake up again. Sometimes, they don't). But I felt like I was just waiting for the story to begin until about chapter five, which was frustrating.
Ajani's character makes a really great bad guy, the perfect foil to Jack even down to questions of self-image and philosophy of existence. These are very important but subtly expressed, implied even. The plot is simple and straightforward but it is the complexity of the characters that make this an interesting read.
And as fun as it was to see so many different genre types thrown together into one book, there were some parts in which Marr wandered a little too far off the beaten track. The result of drawing from too many different detail origins (like in the naming of Wasteland creatures, where she pulls from everything from Norse folklore to psychological conditions to Biblical names. Or the use of an Egyptian spell in the middle of everything to open up a portal between worlds). The result was a cluttered feeling, like there was no common thread running through the book, origins-wise. Even an alien point of commonality would have felt more helpful. Again I point you toward the characters to pull the fraying random edges of the story together and carry them through to the conclusion.
*SPOILER ALERT*
I really did like that at the end after Ajani was defeated, the Arrivals didn't just all happily go home to their own times and places; the rules of the wormhole still applied. I also really liked how Kitty's telepathy and affinity for some of the Wasteland's denizens were worked into the plot. It was, again, indicative of a subtlety that was lacking in the collage of origins in the Wasteland setting.
So. If you're ready for an awesome, character-driven tale of good and evil, you want a story that's just plain fun to read, and you love a good cross-genre novel, pick up a copy of The Arrivals at your favorite local bookstore. It was just released this month.
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