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THE CONFORMITY by John Hornor Jacobs

THE CONFORMITY

From the Twelve-Fingered Boy Trilogy series, volume 3

by John Hornor Jacobs

Pub Date: April 1st, 2015
ISBN: 978-0-7613-9009-1
Publisher: Carolrhoda Lab

Telekinesis, flying teens, reinhabited bodies, giants and more: The Society of Extranaturals returns for the conclusion to the Twelve-Fingered Boy trilogy.

Right from the get-go readers are plunged almost too quickly into the action of Jacobs’ finale. Awakened by a din of screams and crashing trees outside their bunker, Shreve and Jack, heroes of the previous two installments, rally their troops to battle the Conformity, a conglomeration of thousands of innocent human victims fused together into a brown, jellylike bipedal mass by “some massive and unknown telekinetic power.” The Conformity stands stories tall, wreaks havoc wherever it walks and sucks up other humans into its body as it goes. Not only is the action hard to follow from the first page, but it’s interspersed with confusing, often unattributed dialogue that is either spoken or telepathically sent, the latter set apart in bolded italics rather than with quotation marks. Just when readers have almost wrapped their heads around the flying teen heroes, strange communication signals and extensive back story and have settled into this otherwise fairly fast-paced third, Jacobs confoundingly switches gears midway through and adds multiple narrators. All this said, the novel isn’t without genuine action and exciting thrills, it’s just hard to penetrate through the ether to get to the good stuff.

A finale that requires homework of its readers.

(Supernatural thriller. 13-15)