Get Chapelwood (The Borden Dispatches, #2) By Cherie Priest Viewable As Hardcover

this one. It's so curious. Very different writing voice where everything almost sounds like journal entries, It's working for me though,

This cover! Total Covergasm And pretty good so far, Interesting voice.



ing for sitelinkherding cats amp burning soup, Wonderfully creepy, very slow reveal, new characters not in Maplecroft, it isyears later after all and folks have died, This story is told with alternating POV per chapter written either as first person letters or journal entries, This type of style usually feels extra removed from the action, but it works well here, But it is a little slow reveal and Lizzie is fairly removed from a lot of it, Someone mentioned she is more a side character and I have to agree,
This won't be for everyone, but if you can be patient, it really is well done, has some frightening ideas, dark humor and is a wild ride.
I need to stop reading her books, All her books have the subjects I want to read, with such promise, and great ideas but with no execution,

The whole True Americans, as cult and klan members more or less each, taking over the local government read so much like Trump taking the presidency so as to be deeply disturbing.
Problem is, it was the most cthonic and disturbing part of the story!

stars, It was okay, as many of her books are okay, If you itemed out what actually takes place in Chapel wood you'd come up with a short list and a shorter book, So much is just repetition of things that have already happened, treading over the same ground again and again, This is a Novella of material, as was Maplecroft, and didn't need to be draw out like it was, The investigator would have been a fine 'frame' to both stories, he could have represented material as pertinent from all the letters in a kind of report.


As it is, by the end, just has it's starting to pick up pace, . . I'm done, I'm just trying to finish it,

Plus the overyear shift from the first book to the next was just weird, And Elizabeth is not legit old, and hasn't done anything for all this time, she is still an Axe master Did the cold blackness from beyond also help her Has it became Ruths new feet It was never stated.
But, then again, she disappears, Which begs the question of how did she right HER dispatches if she's gone, Was she writing them down in the pitch black building while she was walking Because she said multiple times she couldn't see anything, I call BS on the entire platform

So I'm done, Thank you. I loved this book. Just like book one, it was deliciously fun and chock full of creepy weirdness, But it lost a star at the end, One final event just really made the ending less fulfilling for me, You'll know when you read it, Just felt kind of out of the blue and unfair to the reader,

Maybe we'll get some more though, since this book was supposed to be the last but ended just open enough for potential future entries.
I almost gave this four, but ultimately couldn't, I think I wanted to love this book much more than I actually ended up doing, Pacingwise, the story dragsI can perhaps see why someone else might read it as a sort of slowbuilding terror, but I just ended up bored.
Parts of it read like it was meant to connect to another series not "The Borden Dispatches", some other series, starring Inspector Simon Wolf and his parent organization.
I haven't researched Cherie Priest's other books, so there may be such a series, But the whole situation just felt really shoehorned in,

Parts of this book didn't make sense, Storage Room, for example was creepy, but very out of place.
I kept wondering "why is this in here", which dragged me out of the story, Also, Chapelwood's very particular antiCatholic hatred made no sense, They should be going after all religions equally, shouldn't they The climax seemed illthoughtout and, well, anticlimactic, The character of George Ward seemed redundantI didn't feel he added anything to the overall narrative, The setting had promise, and felt like it was going to deliver some very interesting ideas given Lovecraft's wellknown racisim, but ultimately the whole situation just fizzled.
It felt REALLY bizarre to play up the KKK situation and then not have any AfricanAmerican characters,

Parts were wellwritten, and the character of Lizzie Borden was welldone, Though honestly, I'm not sure how much of that judgment I'm actually drawing from the muchsuperior Maplewood, And some parts of the Lovecraftianness were suitably creepy, Though I think the ending kind of spoiled that, Overall, this book just felt like a number of good ideas poorly stitched together, with some rather bad ideas thrown in to sour the pot.
If you've been missing your dose of Lovecraftian cosmic horror, this book is for you, It has long internal monologues, purple prose and not much action until the end, it's a

slow starter, While in the form, HPL could have never written this book with its sympathetic minorities, evil Klansmen, wife beaters and strong female characters, Priest is ast century author.
The ending is pretty good, indeed almost axekicking and the series title, The Borden Dispatches, is true in more ways than one, Full review at sitelinkSmart Bitches, Trashy Books

I hadnt intended to review Chapelwood for Smart Bitches, but as soon as I told my fellow Bitches that I was reading a book in which Lizzie Borden fights Lovecraftian monsters with an axe, something really alarming happened.
Their eyes got really big and they started drooling and tentacles sprang forth and reached out towards the book that was inconveniently located in my hands, and they gibbered, “GIMMIEGIMMIEGIMMIE.
” So clearly theres some overlap between people who like to read books about true love and happy endings and people who like to read books about New England women slicing the heads off eldritch horrors of the night.
If you fall into the overlap category than this review is for you,

I liked Chapelwood, but not as much as Maplecroft, It should work as a standalone but youll understand Lizzies arc better if you read Mapelcroft first, I think my biggest problem was that Lizzie is very much a sidekick in this book up until the end when she takes a more central role.
I loved having her around as an older woman, but she spends most of the book either away from the main action or assisting Wolf with his investigation.
When she finally picks up an axe, its awesome, but its late in the game, Thats unfortunate, because Lizzie is the most compelling character in a story in which most people more representations of ideas than they are fully realized characters Ruth is the biggest exception here.


It took me a while to decide how I felt about the ending of this story, but Ive settled on a guarded inspiring.
In any Lovecraftstyle story, the hero cannot achieve total victory, There cant be a happy ever after, But there can be a happyfornow, and a victoryfornow, It was nice to see the value of small, temporary victories celebrated, With its all too timely message of fighting forces of ignorance and intolerance and hatred, Chapelwood may not have been the book I wanted, but I think it was the book I needed.
And, as Inspector Wolf says, “Can one really ever get enough of axes”

Carrie S,
From Cherie Priest, the awardwinning author of Maplecroft, comes a new tale of Lizzie Bordens continuing war against the cosmic horrors threatening humanity

Birmingham, Alabama is infested with malevolence.
Prejudice and hatred have consumed the minds and hearts of its populace, A murderer, unimaginatively named “Harry the Hacker” by the press, has been carving up citizens with a hatchet, And from the church known as Chapelwood, an unholy gospel is being spread by a sect that worships dark gods from beyond the heavens.
  

This darkness calls to Lizzie Borden, It is reminiscent of an evil she had dared hoped was extinguished, The parishioners of Chapelwood plan to sacrifice a young woman to summon beings never meant to share reality with humanity, An apocalypse will follow in their wake which will scorch the earth of all life,

Unless she stops it Priest is an excellent writer, and this, in terms of plotting and characterization, is light years ahead of most horror fiction.
The part about a place being taken over by people devoted to evil and their corruption sinking into every aspect of life resonated uncomfortably in postAmerica, and, as before, Lizzie is awesome and Wolf is awesome.


Only four probably only in comparison to Maplecroft, which was jawdroppingly awesome, while this is only excellent, A satisfying, if slightly less compelling, sequel to Maplecroft, Chapelwood takes place in thes in Birmingham, Alabama, where Lizbeth Andrew's presence is requested by her old friend Inspector Wolf after a string of murders that hint toward the supernatural.
I loved what Priest was doing with her setting here, and there were several new characters with whom I wished we had gotten better acquainted principally our final girl, Ruth Gussman, whose grit and will to survive resonates with Lizbeth's in a manner that could have used more "screen time.
" Both my wife and I are disappointed that so we hear there will be no further installments in this series, since Ruth is a character whose career we would both be very interested in following.
for sheer fun from a reader who is somewhat more than average fond of Lovecraftian things much more so than of anything actually authored by Lovecraft.


This story takes placeyears after the events of sitelinkMaplecroft, and thus the cast and the world have changed a little bit.
Some might find this disappointing I thought it worked well, Lizbeth Borden is a tough old lady who seems to be acquiring many cats, as time passes,

I didn't really care for Cherie Priest's steampunky sitelinkBoneshaker, and thus I have avoided the rest of her authorship until this series of "Lizzie Borden took an axe and gave the cephalopodthing forty whacks" came around.
Not sure how her other books would compare to these, Chapelwood by Cherie Priest Note: While this is Bookin the series, it reads just fine as a stand alone,
Set roughlyyears after the events that take place in BookMaplecroft, Lisbeth Borden is finding retirement lonely and boring, She orders books and papers, adopts feral cats, and keeps up an on going letter to her now dead sister Emma, Then the odd and gruesome events of Birmingham, Alabama catch her eye, Then an Inspector Wolf contacts her and asks her to join him on his investigation into the hatchet murders as he suspects that there is more to it, and also that Lisbeth has had some previous dealings with this particular evil.

While I enjoyed Bookmore than this book, it was still worthy, Bookhad all the mystique of the Lizzie Borden historical case tied to it even before I cracked open the cover, This book didnt come with that mystique, so the story in and of itself had to build the anticipation and it did a great job of it! Its earlys and Prohibition is still firmly in place.
In Alabama, we have the True Americans group, which is trying to look a bit more respectable than the Ku Klux Clan and yet still trying to push politics and civil rights in the same direction.
Unwed daughters, despite their age, dont have the legal right to go against their fathers wishes on where to live or work, Essentially, its a hotbed of angry, dissatisfied people, Perfect for the summoning of Cthulu monsters,
Inspector Simon Wolf played a very small part in Bookbut he is front and center here in Book, A dear friend of his, a Catholic priest, asks for his aid and he arrives too late to do much for his friend, But he does his best to assist the young lady Ruth Stevenson who befriended the priest, He often portrays himself as attached to a police office, but hes not, No, his office investigates the unusual, Here in Alabama hes still referred to as the Yank and he has to learn the niceties of Southern hospitality to get along with folks.
Wolf is an interesting character being a gentleman, a man who enjoys a good meal, and the owner of a peculiar sense of humor.

Ruth is in her earlys and is determined to get away from her parents, On the surface, her father is the typical abusive domineering patriarch of the family while Ruths mom is this submissive servant of her husbands orders.
Shes tried running away multiple times, but shes always dragged home, Legally, she cant go against this because she isnt married, Her Catholic priest friend helps solve that by finding her a kind if older husband, However, Catholics are not accepted by the mainstream Protestant Alabama society, Her father doesnt approve of Ruths elopement to a Catholic Puerto Rican, But whats more, he joined the Chapelwood church and Ruth was suppose to join too, Shes key to the churchs sinister endeavors, Shes no fainting lily. Betimes shes scared but she acknowledges that and then pushes on, She also has a strong sense of her personal rights and that makes it ever so much harder for those who want to continue on with their human sacrifices.

As you can see, we have an awesome setting, Its a slow burn as all the people and aspects get into place, Theres plenty here to intrigue you so I was never bored with the book, Once we have everything in place, the pace picks up, Some of the characters already knew of the humanlike monsters, while others have to be brought around to the idea, We even get to spend some time in the head of a former Chapelwood church member who feels the only way to hold off the tide of evil is to take out the designated Chapelwood sacrifices before Chapelwood can sacrifice them appropriately.
Yeah. Totally chilling logic. Its done very well and, as odd as it sounds, I saw why this character did what they did,
This story is a great mix of historical fiction and slowburn horror, The historical basis made the story that much richer, You can tell the author put quite a bit of research into what was going on in earlys Alabama and into understanding how those events and politics and social norms came to be.
The horror aspect is not all gore and violence, Its about things so beyond our understanding that it can push the limits of ones sanity, Its not done in some big dramatic way, This isnt a slasher flick, Theres sound logic and deep thoughts that go into why our characters do what they do, for ultimate good or evil, These characters are complicated and that makes me love or hate them all the more,
Plus the imagery of ayear old spinster taking up an axe to save the world is just too awesome!
 
The Narration: Both our narrators did a great job with regional accents.
It required quite a bit of subtlety at times and it made the listening experience worthy, James Patrick Cronin even varied the speeds of his dialogue based on the regional dialect he was employing, Julie McKays performance of Ruth was excellent with that Southern sass going on,  .