DREAD with a Broken Sky

BH Sprinkle
Sep 13, 2023
2 min read

Welcome back to the Writing with Sprinkle Community !

It's BH!

Here to talk about a new dark fantasy.

It's called CYNOSURA 99 by Sam Weiss.

Coming out... Early October 2023!

It's book 1 in The Altered Planes series.

Once I saw the opportunity to ARC read this piece of promising chilling adventure, I knew that I had to jump on board.

Thankfully getting the chance to find a potentially different book and I was certainly not disappointed.

Thoughts About This One

"Few things in life are certain. For Atra Hart, losing her mind was one of them. But not today. Not in this place. She knelt in front of the toilet. Scraping her finger under her tongue, she dislodged the two pills hidden underneath. Plop! Plop! into the toilet bowl they went."

The start of this book drew me in immediately, leaping into the Atra's headspace, dynamic, and emotional space whilst also conveying action kept me going forward.

Thrown into the chaos of an asylum patient and the crossed boundaries between what's real and what is not. Reality questioned throughout. I found it packed with ominous warnings & occurrences from shadows, silhouettes. These occurrences did great job of conveying mystery, darkness, and eerie emotions.

It questions the mind's ability and freedom in the face of choices.

"Too many choices. She flipped the page. More choices. And on the next page, even more choices. The never-ending menu. She couldn’t decide. Everyone in here, making choices. What time they wanted to eat, what they wanted to eat, what they wanted to do afterward. And they looked miserable doing it."

Relatable to real life. This quote shows that many people with a choice complain when others don't have options. Sometimes decisions and too many choices can be overwhelming also.

Brief Analysis

Not only was the darkness and descriptions beautifully written but a portrayed a realistic character who is genuinely struggling to find the grip on reality that they so desperately need.

Especially the case with Atra.

I feel Tom's mind was falling strictly to guilt over what occurred not only with his experience with the project but with what happened with his daughter. The subtle but not so subtle clues of the things he saw disappearing but not completely gone, were a genius way of conveying the paranoid nature of his personality as well as creeping out the reader.

The story behind the characters' conditions and situation was a borderline to typical sci-fi or portal fantasy executed in a new light.