A Supernatural Sci-fantasy Serial Novel By AJ Cerna
17-year-old Luna wakes up in the middle of the night and her house is on fire. It would be enough to scare the hell out of anyone, but not her, because this is not the first time it happens, and a massive ‘oops, I did it again’ immediately comes to her mind. So, when she finds herself sitting at the police station inside a room with Detective Chu, it is not a surprise either: they’ve met before, and Detective Chu seems to hold a special grudge against her. Despite that, Detective Chu has a compassionate mote towards Luna when he has to deliver the news that her mother, who left home several years ago, has been found dead in the Salton Sea, still inside her car. Having spent too much time under water, it is impossible to determine when and how she died, but it’s highly likely it happened very close to the date she left her family behind.
This is not an easy pill to swallow for Luna, whose life is already ‘the sobbing cliché’, as she herself defines it: her father’s presence lacking from day one, with his addiction to muze, a narcotic sold mostly on Skid Row, and her mother’s disappearance pinning another nail in the coffin. Going through several foster families didn’t make her life any easier, and neither did her borderline-criminal activities. And now this. It’s all too much.
Then she is out. Literally. The amount of information and emotions she has to deal with is overwhelming, her mind becomes frenzy, her body becomes heavier and then she is out. When she opens her eyes again, she is on the street, a few blocks away from the police station, there are no walls around her and no Detective Chu asking her questions or delivering bad news. It’s like she went through a magic portal she doesn’t have any recollection of. There is nothing left to do but going back home with her father. At least there she will have a space to regroup, check-in with herself and think about what to do next.
In her old neighbourhood, she meets an old acquaintance that in the meantime has progressed up the criminal chain, she has a brush with him, but she is rescued by this scary presence – a giant head, as big as an elephant, that has a translucent blue shade and literally sucks the life out of him. Luckily, though, she comes in contact with Hiro, some kind of guru when it comes to the world of Spectres, what they are and how they work, and they reach an agreement: Hiro will take the Spectre with the blue head off her hands if she does some work for him. How not to accept? But is it really the wisest decision? And what will she find out along her journey?
Spectral is set in a nearby future, after a Civil War that transformed the US and the way the people live. The plot is intriguing, and the structure of the book itself taps into the world of mangas, where each volume tells one episode of a longer story. The idea of publishing in weekly instalments, like serial novels were published at the end of the 19th century is intriguing and at the same time very modern (think about platforms like Substack, Wattpad or even Kindle Vella). However, it might also be a double-edge sword: reading the book episode-by-episode at regular intervals is very appealing, reading all episodes one after the other becomes quite an ordeal, because once grouped all together, the episodes reach the staggering amount of 600+ pages. In a world where the attention-span of each one of us is becoming shorter and shorter and challenged by external factors, a book this long has to be extremely extremely gripping to be read seamlessly until the end.
Overall, a great narrative effort by author A. J. Cerna, so we really suggest you to give it a go.
The entire series is available for purchase at: https://amzn.to/3yszBVx
