Book Review: Spirit Mother – Author Adra Steia

SPIRIT MOTHER
Written by Adra Steia
Published by Tease Publications
Publication Date: 2008
Format: Black /White – 340 pages
Price: $14.99

A tragic and horrific tale of love and all things dark and morbid!

One of my goals is to become a horror author. I try to meet as many people in the industry as I possibly can. Well I managed to meet one writer, a very talented and a very beautiful writer by the name of Adra Steia. She is the author of the two books in one book called Spirit Mother: Devotion. There is a little bonus the first novel a short novel called Swamp Baby. The novel is centered around a young woman named Suwanne who lives near a swamp in Florida where there is a legend that Suwanne is very aware of, the legend is that of Spirit-Mother where the legend has it that very few people who have been touched by Spirit-Mother one way or another must make a sacrifice for her. What Spirit-Mother had always wanted all those years ago was that of a child. I don’t want to give too much away about the plot, this is one of those books that you would have to read for yourself in order to get the best out of it.

I’m a firm believer that every horror story should have well developed, well thought out characters. People in the story that you can actually care about, Suwanne and her lover Derry are those types of people that you want to care for. In the events of Swamp Baby, Suwanne was married to an abusive son of a bitch named Michael, this is the type of character you would love to hate. There is a lot of stuff that happens in both Swamp Baby and Spirit Mother, most of the stuff that happens in Adra’s second novel is more outlandish and very bizarre than the events in Swamp Baby, not that anything is wrong with that. There are a few moments in the book where you have to set it on the side and need to take a breather from it, not that anything is wrong with that. I sometimes write the most freakiest, darkest and most morbid stuff that I can think of, whether it’s very violent or very gory, I often have to take a breather and that’s saying that I’m normal.

What Adra has done in her two stories is manage to find a way to get under our skin and really and deeply disturb us. I congratulate her on managing to do that to me. It’s been a while since I’ve read a good horror book that would make me cringe at the stuff that’s going on inside and Adra has managed to do that very well, a great big round of applause for her and her success in writing both Swamp Baby and Spirit Mother. She knows how to tell a tragic and very horrific tale of what one would do for love. There are going to be moments when you do want to see what is about to happen to the characters that you’ve been reading and what horrific turn of events that are about to happen to them.

One of the things that I have learned is that, horror is never a beautiful thing. There are going to be moments when we come upon an apparition and we think automatically that she is the most beautiful thing that you have ever seen, that is what the author has managed to do with Spirit Mother. She can be both very beautiful and very deadly, she is the type of legend you have both been dreaming about and fearing at the same time. The question that I ask is what kind of sacrifice you are willing to make in order to appease the Spirit Mother.

Available from Tease Publications
Also available from www.amazon.com