Title: All’s Forgotten Now
Author: Michael S. Ripley
Publisher: Brilliant Books Literary
ISBN: 978-1728328171
Pages: 166
Genre: Fiction /Thriller/Fantasy/Horror
Reviewed by:Jake Bishop
Hollywood Book Reviews
Initially, you think you’re getting involved in a police procedural. There’s a murder in a Silicon Valley city. Cops converge on the crime scene. The main investigator, ex-Los Angeles homicide detective Ramos, seems like the prototypical protagonist. He’s got a marriage that’s falling apart. A daughter growing up too fast. A co-worker he likes, Meyers a small, sassy female. A co-worker he doesn’t like, Clement, a big, bigoted male. Plus a coroner who has basically seen it all. Typical, right? Wrong. As a reader, the first clue you get that this story is far from typical, is when the beautiful babe that’s been killed and deposited in a dumpster, actually starts to come back to life.
Things definitely get stranger when the supposedly deceased woman gets taken to a hospital and finds a way to escape while a monster from hell and a vampire are wreaking havoc with the clinic’s staff. Holy moly! The games afoot and readers are sucked into a bizarre combination of psychotic potboiler and phantasmagorical road trip. The plot evolves into a search for a magical amulet that can help keep this thing we call earth, safe from ghosts, goblins, the mother of all evil, and a plunge into eternal darkness.
Along the way, an incredible cast of characters keeps the chapters flying by. There’s Yuri, a six foot eight inch ex-Russian mobster who sometimes shapeshifts into a ten foot insatiable hairy Grendel that munches anything and everything in its path. There’s Kessler, a long-haired albino- appearing blood sucker who moves faster than motion itself. There’s Baba Yaga, a grandmotherly wild and wooly witch determined to ride herd over all. There’s a trio of actual humans to reinforce Ramos and his daughter. But most of all, there’s Rose, the seemingly indefatigable ex-corpse that just happens to be an ancient Archivist from a long line of individuals committed to preserving primordial knowledge and protecting The Twilight Veil, a mystical barrier that separates the world we all know from a “malevolent realm of formless spirits.”
Author Ripley is a highly imaginative writer intent on injecting the fantasy world into the real world in an attempt to come up with something wholly original and entertaining. In addition to structuring his story with dream-jumping that whisks readers from one place and time to another, he also develops characters’ backstories with enough information and emotion to make their behavior and reactions particularly plausible. While this is the author’s debut novel, one gets the feeling it’s not likely to be the last we hear from Ripley. Believe it or not.