WARNING: Included one gruesome medical scene
Bridget is R.M. Haldon’s biggest fan. His epic fantasy series, Swords and Shadows, created a lifeline between Bridget and her mom as she lost her battle with cancer. When Bridget met Haldon at his only book signing, she impressed the author with her encyclopedic knowledge of the fantasy world he’d created. Bridget has been working for him ever since as he attempts to write his final book. Now, Haldon is missing, and Bridget is the only person who seems concerned. Can Bridget piece together Haldon’s clues and save him before it’s too late?
This story dives deep into the world of an author’s writing process, obsessed fans, live-action role-playing (LARPing), and the dark web.
What makes this story so amazing is that April Henry basically wrote two stories in one book. Think about it for a second. She had to come up with all these intricate details, a plotline, several characters, and even passages of dialogue for a fake medieval fantasy book series to go along with the overall story. How impressive is that!
The story is told through four different points of view: Bridget, Bob a.k.a R.M. Haldon, the kidnapper, and Bridget’s love interest, Ajay. I loved Bob’s narrative the best, how his mindset changed the longer he was in captivity. I was mainly engrossed by his overall writing process. The poor guy was under so much pressure from his publisher, his agent, and his fans to finish the last book in his fantasy series. It’s no wonder he had writer’s block. I only write and illustrate children’s picture books, but I can say from personal experience that writing is harder than most people think. Drawing the illustrations turned out to be the easy part. Figuring out how the story is going to work and what the characters are going to say and do is the hard part.
In my opinion, the longer it takes an author to write a story, the better said story is. Authors who publish two or three books a year often lack that special something in their books. There’s a difference between writing a story and putting your very soul on the page.
As an avid reader and TV watcher, I have been invested in many different stories. But my obsession is tame compared to the deranged fans featured in this story. There are many kinds of fans. There are the tame fans, those who write fan fiction. There are the eccentric fans, who dress up in elaborate costumes. There are the angry fans, who demand answers. And then there are the crazy fans, the ones who can no longer distinguish fantasy from reality.
Overall, you know you are engaged in a story when it has you exclaiming things like ‘good lord’ and ‘oh come on!”
Ending thought, can someone tell me why all psychopaths have cabins in the middle of nowhere? Be wary of anyone who says they have a cabin in the woods. Odds are, they are a psychopath.