Lora Hates Spam

by Nicholas Carey

I love carnival stories and especially creepy carnival stories, so this was a fun read for me. In some ways it read like a YA, but was mostly well done. Christopher had a bicycle accident and is thrust into an afterlife situation created with a lot of imagination. After he tries to hit on Death's daughter, he discovers purgatory set up like one big carnival, but with some pretty unpleasant things that go on.

Christopher and Cassandra were easy characters to like, each for their own reasons. The plot had original elements that kept my interest and the whole nasty carnival atmosphere was creepy in all the right ways, except that there was rather a lot of gore considering everyone there was supposed to be dead already. Some of it started getting gratuitous.

Still, I did feel I needed to find out what would happen in the end and though the plotting wasn't brilliant, the characters carried it well enough.