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Shaun Hamill’s fiction jolts the reader with an immediate sense of ambition, a sense that they are about to be not just immersed, but plunged into something enormous that nevertheless keeps a grip on its humanity. With his follow-up to A Cosmology of Monsters, The Dissonance, Hamill once again retains that massive scope while telling a deeply felt story of loss, love and a chance at redemption, solidifying his place as one of genre fiction’s brightest rising stars.
In their teenage years, Hal, Erin and Athena were introduced to an obscure and powerful magical system known as the Dissonance. They spent their high school summers being tutored by a local professor in their hometown of Clegg, Texas, learning the right way to wield the uncommon and often frightening power that stemmed from their own negative emotions. Then tragedy struck, leaving the trio missing a friend and separated by time, grief and a disconnection from the magic they once shared.
Two decades later, Hal, Erin and Athena reunite in Clegg as the 20-year memorial for the event that rent them apart looms and strange happenings rock the landscape around them. Together with a local teen named Owen, who is caught up in a supernatural mystery of his own, the trio hurtle toward something dark, something that could spell the end of everything or be the beginning of their path back from the brink.
Hamill’s story is packed with fantasy and horror delights, from dark rituals in cemeteries to monsters in the forest to powerful swords that were once thought to be merely mythical. The sense that these characters are caught in the midst of something much bigger than themselves, are being buffeted on all sides by something titanic, is immediate, thrilling and seductive. But even as supernatural weather and the realities of living in a magical world are ever present, the characters always come first. Hal, Athena and Erin emerge as fully formed people carrying heavy burdens that are simultaneously fantastical and relatable, their emotions nearly tangible thanks to Hamill’s direct and page-turning prose.
The Dissonance will hook you with its phantasmagoria of dark imagery, but it will keep you reading because it’s a story about how the shared traumas of our youths can both shape us and save us. It’s fantasy, horror, a coming-of-age journey and so much more.