Blending elements of Old Testament myth and dark fantasy, Levant DuPrae’s novel revolves around Lot and his tribulations leading up to his exodus from Sodom, when the city was destroyed by God after Lot failed to find five righteous men in the city riddled with depravity.
When God tells Lot in a vision to leave his homeland and journey to his destiny on the banks of the Jordan River, the man of great faith takes his people and begins the long journey. He doesn’t realize, however, that he’s leading them to a city of legendary prosperity—and moral corruption—where the populace worship the warrior goddess Ishtar and pay tribute to the deity through carnal acts.
As Lot draws nearer to the city, the adult son of King Bera of Sodom, Prince Rathod, schemes to steal power from his sister Sharina, who—as queen and married to her own father—currently rules with Bera. After meeting and becoming enamored with a seemingly otherworldly beauty named Althea (who may or may not be a vampire), the oversexed prince finds himself caught up in dangerous sexual and political entanglements.
While the fusion of vampiric and Biblical myth is intriguing, the novel’s lack of editing and proofreading is a significant flaw. Grammatical and spelling errors inundate the text. The nomadic Helamites, for example—Sodom’s “forever enemies”—are misspelled as Helemites multiple times. Numerous sentences are missing punctuation. Character names are misspelled on the same page (Badissy and Badisy).
Even more concerning is the writing style, which features sentence fragments and an inexplicable fixation on adverbs throughout. The blatant overuse of adverbs in sentences like “…which moved him to snappily take in the magnificent grandeur of his great city…” and “He frenziedly looked around…” make for an erratic and ultimately frustrating reading experience.
While the story offers some potentially interesting characters and storylines, the novel is laid low by such issues.
