Gearteeth by Timothy Black

When most people think their world might come tumbling down around them, it's more metaphorical than it is for Elijah Kelly.  He lives in a world where cities have taken to the skies to escape a pandemic.  Though biological in nature, it leaves the victims more closely resembling a curse. A werewolf curse to be more precise.

We meet Elijah right as he has his first contact with a werewolf and, as one might guess, it doesn't turn out well.  In a matter of minutes he loses his friend and partner at work and he also gets infected himself.  Since nobody realizes he, too, has been infected, Eli now has to spend the few weeks until the next full moon trying to find a cure, a control or a way to leave their flying city.

These first few weeks for Eli are some of the best parts of the book.  It's were so much of our entrance into this strange world happens.  We start off learning about Eli and his grandmother, Maude and some about Henry, Eli's best friend.  There's enough interaction with the rest of the city that, we get some semblance of life aboard it and even a rudimentary idea of the social structure there.  There quite possibly have been a whole book exploring those aspects of this world.  Later on we get to meet some who have made a place for themselves on the ground but, I won't go into detail there (spoilers).  We do get introduced to some good characters there and that too could have been a tome all its own.

I love the setting.  Nothing says steampunk better than rail yards.  When you combine rail yards with flying machines and overly complicated machinery, that is steampunk at its finest.  Even when the focus shifts to events on the ground, it's still close enough to  the rail yard that the story is able to maintain that environment going.

There are two aspects I didn't quite enjoy once the focus shift to earth.  I won't go into because I feel it gives too much away but the second has to do with credibility.  I really do get the fact that, this is fantasy and odd things happen.  I mean, that's what drew us to these stories in the first place.  There is one thing any work of fantasy must stay true to and that is itself.  There are a few key points where it seemed that the story ignored events that had just occurred in order to keep the narrative going at the pace the author had set.  This could have been to very good books though, I will admit, I'm not sure how that would have impacted future books in the series.

All in All, Gearteeth is a book with an intriguing concept.  There is quite a bit of gore and blood since it's filled with werewolves (and not Labradoodles).  I would put this one as a definite PG13 due the violence and some of the more challenging social aspects.

Posted by Tynga at 02:00

 Author, Gearteeth, Paranormal, Review, steampunk, Timothy Black, werewol  2 People left their mark

Tynga is a 32 years old mom of two, from Montreal, working as a lab technician in an hospital specialized in heart disease. In her free time, she enjoys reading all things Paranormal and photography.

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