Book One of The Mantis Gland Series!
The scene is set in Teslon City, we are in the year 250 of the Advance Era. In this timeline, life as we know it went on until World War III, at which point societies collapsed, royal families ceased to exist and continents lost their reason to be, beside their borders. People turned against each other, family vs. family, blood vs. blood, and the world as we know it ceased to exist.
From this chaos, The Oselian society arose, and with it a new ‘us-them’ division; this time, though, it isn’t about race or religion or sexual orientation, but more about ‘us’, humans, and ‘them’, Shifts, a more evolved type of human being, born with a photonova, or mantis, gland right in between the two cerebral hemispheres. This gland makes the Shifts channel the cosmic energy for their purposes and gives them otherworldly abilities, like super fast speed or teleport. It starts to develop when Shifts enter puberty, meaning they look like ‘normal’ children until they start to show signs of supernatural powers. A specific part of society, who found out that eating the mantis gland gives the eater enhanced speed, strength, agility and health, began to hunt the Shifts to eat this gland, eventually forming a cult-like congregation named the Messiahs. Agrell is one of them.
She was raised by mystical stories of her initiation, and how it would be such a special day and how incredible her life will be after that moment. What she doesn’t know, though, is what she has to do to live this incredible life, and when she realises she has to eat this gland from her cousin’s head, who’s just been cracked open, she is shocked. As if in a dream, she swallows it, but after she can’t cope with what she saw and did, and the following day she flees home.
In a different part of the city, Ilya, 19, is going back home. She lives in a makeshift shack in a shanty part of the city, along with two other boys riddled by blood corruption, a virus that more often than not is fatal. They are both nearing the end, Ilya has no expectations, she saw others before and she recognises the signs. She can only wait and hope they will go peacefully. They’ll do, not long after she comes back home, and Ilya is once again alone. She is a Shift, and when her parents realised it, they took her at the city borders and abandoned her. In the shantytown where she lives there are many more like her and the two boys.
Dozi lives alone at the edge of the Spritehood, Teslon city neighbourhood inhabited by Demifae, another group of enhanced humans. She left her village at the age of 11, looking for something more in life. She doesn’t hate Shifts, but she wants to become a Demifae. Eventually, Agrell, Ilya and Dozi will cross each other’s path, meet other people and set themselves on an almost impossible quest, but, spoiler alert, one of them will not make it.
The book itself is a good read: it’s imaginative, the narrative is fine and moves forward, the idea behind it is interesting. However, there are some faults: the timeline is confused and not always linear (Ilya, for example, is in the present, when the two boys living with her are dying, then she tells about the past and how she ended up there, but it’s not clear what happened first and what next), the characters are flat and don’t develop throughout the book. Lastly, despite being advertised as an LGBTQ+ book, there are no elements that can classify it as such, at least not in the first instalment. There are more, though, so this remains to be seen.
I found particularly commendable the specularity between some situations and characteristics of the Teslon world and ours, like how when Shifts transform they are often abandoned, just like many teenagers are disowned by their family when they come out as gay, or how the main mission of the Messiahs is to create a better world by eliminating all the Shifts, one by one, that compares to homophobic slurs, conversion therapy and discrimination towards LGBTQ+ people in our society, in the past but in the present too. I would have liked a deeper jab at this, but I hope it will happen in the next chapters of the series.
The Mantis Variant is available for purchase at: https://amzn.to/4cmeXpc