Book Review: PATH OF TOTALITY by K.N. Gould

"This world is a cruel and arbitrary place." Tucker Gibson is just a child when he first hears these words, uttered by a deranged man who has murdered his fellow crewmen aboard a Coast Guard boat. Tucker and his father, out on a clam-digging expedition, discover the boat marooned on the shoals and board it to investigate. The grisly scene that greets them, and those enigmatic words -- offered moments before the killer takes his own life -- will come back to haunt Tucker as an adult when, serving as a law clerk, one of his firm's new clients tells him the exact same thing. The client commits suicide shortly after this fateful meeting, leaving Tucker wondering what the cryptic phrase could possibly mean. When he meets an equally mysterious woman named Rebekah, those answers suddenly seem tantalizingly within his reach.

Psychologist Carl Jung once posited: "In all chaos there is a cosmos, in all disorder a secret order." This theme runs throughout KN Gould's "Path of Totality," where nothing is as random as it first seems. In fact, the chaotic events that shape and shift not only Tucker's life, but Rebekah's as well, and those of everyone with whom they come into contact, all have one common thread: Charlotte, a young woman whose outward beauty belies her truly dark and twisted nature as an agent of chaos dealing in her trade with a cruel and ruthless fervor.

Delving into themes of occultism and dark magic, Gould draws the reader along with Tucker into a dangerous game of cat-and-mouse as he and Rebekah try to stop Charlotte's havoc once and for all. Charlotte, however, has no intention of going down easy or without a fight, and what a final showdown Gould gives us.

I was introduced to Gould's writing through his novella "Out of Whack," and when I read that, I knew he'd be an author to watch. This is his debut novel, but it reads with the confident pacing and descriptive worldbuilding of a seasoned storyteller just finding his stride. The book's title is a reference to the narrow area on the surface of the earth that's cast into darkness during a solar eclipse. In the story, Charlotte uses the term to refer to those like Tucker and Rebekah who are unfortunate enough to find themselves in her path of destruction. "Path of Totality" is a dark, disturbing fable reminding us that some secrets are best left undiscovered.

Available here.