Supernatural: Nevermore by Keith R. A. DeCandido

Supernatural: Nevermore by Keith R. A. DeCandido

Twenty-two years ago, Sam and Dean Winchester lost their mother to a mysterious and demonic supernatural force. In the years after, their father, John, taught them about the paranormal evil that lives in the dark corners and on the back roads of America...and he taught them how to kill it.

* * *

Sam and Dean have hit New York City to check out a local rocker's haunted house. But before they can figure out why a lovesick banshee in an '80s heavy-metal T-shirt is wailing in the bedroom, a far more macabre crime catches their attention. Not far from the house, two university students were beaten to death by a strange assailant. A murder that's bizarre even by New York City standards, it's the latest in a line of killings that the brothers soon suspect are based on the creepy stories of legendary writer Edgar Allen Poe.

Their investigation leads them to the center of one of Poe's horror classics, face-to-face with their most terrifying foe yet. And if Sam and Dean don't rewrite the ending of this chilling tale, a grisly serial killer will end their lives forevermore.

I don't think Keith DeCandido did as much research on the show as he claims he did in his author's notes in the back of the book. He shows a decided lack of insight into the personalities of both Sam and Dean, in particular, Dean. Hell, he couldn't even get their physical descriptions right! All we get are vague descriptions that could be anybody. Or maybe he just assumed we would know who he was talking about from a few brief lines of text?

The inconsistencies abound in this book. For starters, Dean rarely surrenders the keys to the Impala to anyone, even Sam. And Dean get lost? Yeah, right. Also, while Sam can be a major pain in Dean's ass, the Sam in this book doesn't compute with the Sam we know from the series. Both characters lack a personality, which as followers of the series know, both boys have in spades.

Too many pages are wasted on descriptions of the Bronx and its environs, pages that could have been used for character development instead. The supporting players in this novel are weak at best and definitely poorly developed. I have to agree with one Amazon reviewer who stated that if John Winchester had really known the Poe expert Pym, he'd have shot the guy just because he's so freaking annoying! And the female cop, McBain? Nobody gets away with talking to Dean the way she does in this crappy book. Hell, even Hendrickson got over that pretty quick once he realized the way things really are in the season 3 episode, "Jus in Bello".

Don't get me started on the two "cases" presented in this book. For one thing, Sam and Dean don't even fully resolve the case of Manfred's haunting by a former girlfriend of one of his fellow bandmembers. Stupid, for one thing, and NOT something that Sam and Dean would do, for another. These two don't believe in leaving loose ends. They always resolve the cases they take on, one way or another.

The whole Edgar Allan Poe case was just silly. It was obvious who the "villain" was, so there was no suspense and no real payoff in the end. It also bugged me that for someone supposedly intelligent, the villainous professor was a total idiot. Someone who is an academic would have done more research on the so-called resurrection ritual and quickly realized that it was something that a charlatan pulled out of his ass.

Unfortunately, it seems that those who write fan fiction based on Supernatural have a better grasp of the characters, their personalities and the mythology of the show than Mr. DeCandido does. I sincerely hope that Mr. DeCandido did a lot more research on the series before writing Bone Key, his second Supernatural tie-in novel.