Dear Ambivalence: The Mustachioed One, The Witches And The Suspended Body- Book Release

Dear Ambivalence: The Mustachioed One, The Witches And The Suspended Body…. the title sure is something, huh, but when the writer is Deadly Premonition creator Hidetaka "Swery" Suehiro what would you expect? The distinctively quirky auteur has produced some intriguingly singular videogames include Deadly Premonition, D4, The MISSING, and The Good Life. His reputation for building interesting worlds filled with quirky characters with a somewhat irregular tone is known. As a pop culture and cult TV and film fan, his references hit hard and fast and so we get influences by David Lynch, The Cat People and a lot of general Americana.

This novel is not a slight undertaking, coming in at an impressive 484 pages. The blurb is peak Swery and pulls you in:

"When the naked, hairless, brutalized corpse of a young girl is discovered in the British countryside, everyone finds themselves asking the same question: Who did this, and why...?

Normally, this quiet idyllic town's policemen spend the bulk of their time chasing around lost sheep.

But then, one day, they found her... Elizabeth Cole. 17 years old, female... Hanging upside down from the town's symbolic elm tree... Dripping with morning dew, shaved completely hairless, missing every last one of her organs.

Witch hunts... Magic wands... Milk lorries... Nuts and coffee.

Neverending rumors... Inescapable sins.

Emily, a detective who was recently demoted from her post in London, teams up with a small moustachioed gentleman named Poco in order to bring the truth to light."

On day of English language release, I bought the book and have been reading it as my October Halloween read. I can say that I'm 13% in and am loving it. The fact that the narrator is a cat took some getting used to but it works. With Swery, the obvious doesn't apply so go in knowing you're going to be for an idiosyncratic journey so strap in as it's a going to be a heck of a ride. When I finish the book I'll write a review but currently it's thoroughly enjoyable in the usual janky Swery way.