Unholy Night by Seth Grahame-Smith
My rating: 2 of 5 stars
Got this one from a friend who loaned me a whole stack of books. I’ve been out of the reading rhythm for a while so I decided to start with this one since it seemed light-hearted and silly. It really wasn’t. It was kind of tedious, but I chalked that up to my being a rusty reader. Having just finished it though, I’m not so sure if it was me or just the novel.
Ostensibly a re-telling of the baby-Jesus story and His flight to Egypt. But what do you expect from a re-telling: is it an homage, a parody, straight-up plagiarism? None of these in Unholy Night, I’m afraid. Just a loose framework used to tell a hack-n-slash adventure story.
Which is fine, and don’t get me wrong—if there’s cyberpunk and steampunk, why not history-punk? I’m all for innovative genres. But everything Unholy Night got from this “history” was also the only thing it had going for it. And that included a lot of deus ex machina.
I mean, a lot. A story about one of the three wise-man using his sword and hatred to protect the Messiah as they try to escape Herod- and whenever it looks like they’re trapped, voila, a miracle happens. Please. I feel as if a great opportunity for parody was utterly missed here. I get it—this is The Living God wrapped in his arms, so “deus ex machina” is almost obligatory. Maybe that’s why it felt flat.
Too many conveniences, too many coincidences, too much horror with too little consequence. I guess the best thing I can say about Unholy Night is that, like the Bible itself, it ended up just being a bunch of words, words words.