Ragman by J.G. Faherty
My rating: 4 of 5 stars
**3.5-stars rounded up**
Ragman is a fun-filled, brutally-descriptive Horror romp through the streets of modern-day New York City, following multiple perspectives, all trying to survive the wrath of an ancient mummy’s curse.
I’ve actually never read a book featuring a mummy before and ended up having a ton of fun with this one. It was a bit like a SyFy channel movie come to the page and frankly, that hit the spot for my current reading mood.
In this story our main characters include Dan, a current NYPD officer, his ex-partner, disgraced NYPD officer, Tom, Dan’s wife, Joanna, a forensic lab tech, and Stacy, Tom’s ex-girlfriend, who works at an Egyptian Museum in the city. We do get a couple of other perspectives, but these four were really the stars of the show.
The gist of this is that in the 1800s, a group of very rich young men traveled to Egypt, raided a temple, killed the priest of the temple and robbed a bunch of ancient artifacts to increase their own wealth and prestige.
A mummy from this theft ends up at a museum of Egyptology in New York City, where present day it is awakened. Said mummy rises from his slumber with a deep yearning for revenge against those who’d wronged him and his temple.
As luck would have it, the descendants of these tomb raiders, now mostly live in NYC, convenient yes, but not surprising. They’re all still incredibly wealthy families and New York City is a known haven for the ultra-rich.
And when very rich men begin to be brutally murdered, literally torn limb-from-limb, it draws attention. When people, including our protagonists, witness the being doing the murdering, they can hardly believe their eyes.
A giant mummy erupting out of thin air with a clear vengeance against particular people. It’s unclear how they’ll ever be able to stop it. Bullets have zero effect.
How will they stop it?
I’ll be honest, I started to feel a little hopeless here. This ancient killing machine seemed unstoppable. How could our protagonists ever survive its wrath?!
As mentioned above, I had a lot of fun with this. It wasn’t perfect, but it definitely kept me entertained and wanting to read more.
The killing scenes were wild, brutal, descriptive and cringe-worthy. That’s basically everything I’m looking for in a supernatural creature feature.
This is the second novel that I have read from Faherty and both had very engaging horror imagery. He has quite the knack for creatively killing people off.
Additionally, in this one, I enjoyed all of the ancient Egyptian lore and concepts included. It gave the narrative a little something extra that was just so interesting. I loved the premise and how it followed through to the end.
Finally, I will mention that I really enjoyed Tom and Dan. I liked the women as well, especially Joanna, but the relationship between Tom and Dan was very well done.
They were partners and best friends at one point, but had a falling out, so a lot of this focused on them rebuilding trust and friendship.
I liked watching that play-out amidst a backdrop of brutal murders. It sounds insane, but it’s true. I really felt for Tom, he got the short-end of the stick quite a bit, so I loved seeing him gain some confidence back over the course of this story.
I’m hoping there is a sequel to this following these main characters. Faherty definitely set-up that possibility and I would absolutely be here for it.
Thank you so much to the publisher, Flame Tree Press, for providing me with a copy to read and review. This was a damn good time!