The Basilisk's Creed Omnibus
By Eme Strife
Reviewed by Sandra Long
4 Stars
Immerse yourself in the first omnibus of Eme Strife's addictive, sexy, enchanting, and surreal New Adult series. Each page will leave you even more enthralled than the last, on the edge of your seat, and vigorously chomping at the bit for more.
Note: This is NOT like anything you've ever read before. Proceed knowing you have been told.
This is a paranormal book about a romance between a human and a soul reaper. It takes a vivid imagination to keep up with this storyline.
Eli is a girl struggling to pay her bills and feed herself by working two jobs, one as a waitress in a diner and a night job stocking wine and other supplies in a very high class night club. She has a very poor self image even though she is attractive. She has never had enough money to have the clothes, make up and hair care to look the part of a beautiful, sexy young woman, so she has never realized her true potential.
There is something very mysterious in the huge basement of the club where she stocks the wine racks. There are multiple hallways, tunnels, where signs with letters and numbers are the only directions to find her way in the huge maze. She is working alone one night and trying to take several cases of very expensive wine to its proper location. She gets lost, finds a golden ball sitting on a shelf gathering dust. It appears to say "Atlantic Ocean". She thinks she must be hallucinating and she feels very uneasy as she stumbles along and finally reaches her destination. She carefully unpacks, wipes down and shelves each individual bottle of wine in the appropriate rack but when she finishes, she has an extra bottle and no where to put it. She decides to place it on a shelf and tell her supervisor so he can do something with it, but she stumbles and drops the bottle, breaking it. To prevent herself from falling she reaches out and finds her hands on the golden ball she had seen before. Her hands seem to sink into the ball before she can pull away. Then, as she stands up, the broken bottle of wine and all its contents take flight and enter the golden ball, turning it a brilliant red. Eli runs, too afraid to stay and too afraid of being thought crazy to tell anyone.
Eli has no boyfriend but in her dreams she meets and falls for Matt, the soul reaper, and he is also falling for her, but they live in two separate worlds and neither knows the identity of the other. Matt, in addition to being a soul reaper, is also the owner of the club where Eli has been working, but neither of them know that.
Strange things begin to happen---the Atlantic Ocean disappears, stranding ships and all forms of aquatic life ( including mer-people) on a dry ocean floor. The soul reapers, under Matt's direction, rescue as many people and creatures as they can even though this is forbidden in their world. In the process of rescuing creatures from the ocean floor Matt sees a huge set of handprints on the bottom of the ocean. Later in the story as he is kissing Eli's palms, he recognizes hers as the handprints from the ocean but cannot figure out how that can be possible. Then suddenly the sky starts raining down pieces of broken glass and wine, filling the ocean bottom with wine.
There is a power struggle among the soul reapers and their world that Matt is determined to stop and to end the destructive acts being carried out by the rogue reapers. Eli suddenly has powers she has no idea where they came from. Her landlord beats on her door demanding that she pay her rent and when she tells him to go fuck himself, he does--so violently and non-stop-that he has to be hospitalized and tranquilized. She goes to a drug store to ask for headache medicine and when the druggist refuses to give her what she wants because it is a controlled substance, she tells him to shut up talking and give her what she needs. He immediately gives her the medicine, then pulls out his own tongue and bleeds to death right in front of her. Every time she tells someone to do something, it happens. She has no idea what is going on.
Every time she is with Matt and the passion is hot and heavy, she is sleeping and before they can consummate their relationship, her alarm clock sounds, she wakes up and disappears from his sight. The reader is acutely aware that the supernatural disasters have to be related to the golden ball and Eli is the only one who can tell Matt about it but she does not realize the implications for him. And because he loses focus of everything except his desire for her whenever he is with her, he does not think to question her until she disappears.
Power struggles and danger in Matt's world, supernatural disasters and human greed and cruelty in Eli's world, and neither know that they hold the secrets that can help both worlds find peace again. The book ends with no resolution. The reader can only hope there will be a second part to bring this story to some type of conclusion. Four stars because the story leaves the reader too much in the dark for five.
Eme is an unconventional writer and cynic who might be going through a quarter-life crisis even if she is in denial of it. Lucky for her, she has sarcastic, upbeat, and severely vulgar imaginary friends to give her some semblance of normalcy(^_^).
