"What would happen if the anti-Christ refused to cooperate? Three mornings in a row I sat down to read one chapter of The Anti-Soul while I ate my cereal and had to force myself to stop reading when I was nearly an hour late getting to my own work. So when Sunday arrived, I curled up with the book and didn't get up until I'd finished it. That was three days ago and I'm still thinking about The Anti-Soul. I can't say that about the last half a dozen or so books I've read. Perhaps only Cormac McCarthy's The Road has touched and frightened me in the ways Burwell's first novel does.
"There were times in the center of the narrative that I wanted to stop reading and couldn't; passages so horrific and captivating that I felt as if I too had been infected with an anti-soul and was being forced against my will to participate with it. Like Theo, I eventually found the strength to refuse to cooperate. But that makes me a poor reader of horror, not the writer a poor crafter of it. As a writer who works very hard to get my prose to enact the narrative, I bow my head to Burwell's ability to do it. And once I'd skipped a few pages and opened my eyes again, I was pleased to be on the outside looking in, filled with the strange adolescent thrill of being snowbound in the Midwest while a blizzard rages and death taps against the picture window as life turns monochrome.
"With Greg Brown's ability to make physics a character, Stephen King's ability to plot, Dan Brown's fascination with Catholic mysticism and a Jesuit's ability to render that mysticism rational, Burwell's book is one for philosophers both religious and atheist. But do not expect to be able to put it down untouched by the infection."
Free Kindle Reading Apps from Amazon allow you to download The Anti-Soul to your Tablet,Computer or Smartphone, in addition to Amazon Kindle Readers. $3.99 US
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