Amber Sparks and Robert Kloss' The Desert Places

Amber Sparks and Robert Kloss, complete with illustrations by Matt Kish, combine to write The Desert Places. This terse novel of just eighty-seven pages artfully explores the confines of evil, the hunger that is the devil or Satan or ill nature and intent in general. Born from nothing, never fully named, but only expressed, this essence hungers for something, and upon watching the birth man from primitive primate beings, the idea quests man with an unflinching eye.

Thus we follow the exploits of evil, the want and desire to consume and devour man from the earliest days to the bitter, post-apocalyptic end. The entity explores Eden, Gladiator Games, and the technology ridden present (and future), and of course the ultimate destruction that is coming at the hands of our great weapons of mass destruction. At the center of it all, the create hungers and hungers. This hunger consumes Christian martyrs and the corpses of mass extinction alike. Did it wish us dead, did it hunger to corrupt, or did it merely want to ingest? These questions rest at the thematic center of this work, one that is both creative and artful. A text that you can read in only an hour, The Desert Places makes you think in an innovative, literary manner.

Favorite lines:

• "Waiting for women to be made and wagering on how procreation would happen: finger to finger? Ears filled with seeds? Tails that would drop off and grow into small saplings? In any case the new ground, soft and wet, soaked up their blood and so the earth experienced sin and so we were truly doomed at the start of you"