THE CURSE AT THE END OF THE WORLD

The concluding installment of Hincker’s The History of Light pentalogy chronicles an emotionally fractured painter’s attempt to save the world.

Skysill Beach, an artists’ colony/tourist trap on the Southern California coast, has seen better days: A curse is “dismantling” the world, and everyone outside of the colony may already be dead. Asher Gale, a painter and recovering drug addict at Skysill Beach, has visions (or twisted hallucinations) increasingly filled with apocalyptic images: “I saw the Earth devastated. Everything shattered. A dark disk in the sky. Cities leaning, empty, oceans dried, mountains thrown over.” Reality isn’t much better—the sun has begun to inexplicably go out (“there was a round, black disc in the sky in its place, and darkness deeper than grave shadow everywhere I looked”). Nightmarish monsters are falling from the sky, and grotesque spirits are emerging from inhabitants’ backs like cicadas freeing themselves from shells. With his girlfriend Caroline dead and his essence progressively fracturing, Ash must somehow figure out how to stop the curse and free billions of spirits stuck on Earth yearning to travel through dimensions to the Forgiving Sea, where they can wash their spirits clean before time ends. While this story works well as an eschatological fantasy, it’s ultimately not so much a narrative about unlikely heroes at the end of the world as it is a story about the transcendent power of love. Although Hincker heaps on Ash’s sarcasm and snark throughout the series (sometimes to the detriment of the story’s intensity), the emotional connection between him and Caroline is intense and authentic. Their relationship is the fuel that powers the narrative to its stand-up-and-applaud conclusion. Readers will be enthralled right up to the very last page.

A fitting end to a wild and unique paranormal fantasy saga.