In J. Robert King's Angel of Death , the Kingdom of Heaven is real and literal, with both humanity and angels having their place in the Divine Scheme:
There is a true ladder of being – a Jacob’s Ladder, as humans might call it, and angels ascend and descend it all the time. There is an unbroken path from God down to the simplest virus, and humans are somewhere halfway up that infinite climb. Angels are a little more than humans. (p.12)
The Angel of Death for the Chicago-Milwaukee metropolitan area is particularly busy rendering people's deaths suitably elegant or ironic, or both, those lives taken against the way they or their loved ones have lived them.
John Wayne Gacy & Jeffrey Dahmer
The Angel's responsibilities include accidents, diseases, suicide and murder; the serial killer, while contributing greatly to the destined number of deaths, is not a manifestation that the Angel likes, since their methods run directly opposite to his. Nonetheless, he must work with them, since his appointment arose from the high number of such deaths in his demesne, which include the work of John Wayne Gacy and Jeffrey Dahmer.
One such killer is Keith McFarland, a disaffected loner from a silent race that has never been invited into the modern age. Sullen. Fitful. gaunt. Enraged. As murderous as the night. (p.22)
With the Angel's assistance, McFarland goes on a killing spree that attracts the attention of Investigator Donna Leland, lone police woman and a kind heart beneath a professional exterior, who has never recovered from the death of her twin brother during adolescence.
What neither she nor the Angel of Death realize that they will fall in love. A union of human and angel produces the monstrous nephalim, giant half-breeds so large their birth inevitably kills the mother in delivery.
From here on the reader should beware spoiler alerts.
Up the point at which the Angel of Death commits the mortal sin of falling in love with one of the people whose deaths he is supposed to render artistic, King's novel has followed a standard course, even if ornamented with superior prose.
Son of Man
But at the close of the first section, 'Son of God,' the novel deviates sharply: supposedly invisible to mortal eyes, the Angel finds himself powerless, trapped as a punishment for his sin in the mortal form of fellow policeman Azra, with whom Donna has had a brief but passionate affair, and arrested as the serial killer's partner.
In the second section, 'Son of Man,' as the consequences of Azra's fall become clear, Donna admits her love for the killer to her chief, and takes a leave of absence to work on Azra's defence. A fellow inmate invents a defence for him involving the first Gulf War and trauma, but Azra kills him as well, and his fate is sealed from that moment on. When he is told that Donna has been killed in a road traffic accident, Azra begins to jettison his tenuous link with normality and escapes, after killing his guards, to embark on another killing spree.
Son of Sam
In the last section, 'Son of Sam,' Azra has now been identified as the Son of Samrael, a name inevitably shortened to the more famous abbreviation. Azra cuts off the faces of his victims, and as he slowly regains his powers, uses them as masks. With each killing his humanity recedes; when he learns that not only has Donna survived but is pregnant, he determines that the child must die.
Donna is drawn into the manhunt, becoming ever more determined that her baby will be redeemed by her helping to bring to justice his father, and allowing herself to be set up as bait in a complex trap which goes horribly wrong..
Dean Koontz & Wings of Desire
Rightly compared to Koontz, and to John Connelly's The Lovers, King's Angel of Death shares certain concerns with Wim Wenders' Wings of Desire, but is a far darker book.
If in the end the book's ending feels the tiniest bit anticlimatic, it is only because King has set the stakes so ferociously high that nothing but the end of the world could match them, but ultimately what the story lacks in grand guignol it more than makes up for in poignancy. Angel of Death is one of the finest dark fantasies of 2009, and one of its publisher's stand out books.
Colin Harvey - Author six novels, and editor of four anthologies; professional reviewer since 2003, including six years at Strange Horizons. Member of ...
