A review by eggcatsreads
The Man Made of Smoke by Alex North

2.25

While this book didn’t work the best for me, I strongly believe that is more due to the fact that I was expecting a more straightforward thriller as opposed to one with more of a supernatural feel to it. 

This novel starts off strong, with our main character encountering a notorious serial killer - and his last victim - during a bathroom break on a road trip. Despite knowing something is wrong, our main character - being a child - decided to hide and to abandon the other boy he sees to his fate. Haunted by this choice, he became obsessed with the case and even pursued a career in criminal profiling and psychology. 

However, the story started to fall apart for me once his father goes missing and he tries to investigate his last days before his sudden disappearance - and assumed death. Attempting to put himself into the head of his father is written like his father is a kind of ghost in his mind, communicating and giving him information about his reasonings. Granted - nothing this “ghost” says isn’t something the main character already didn’t know, but when this is then stretched to try to understand the serial killer he begins hunting it made it difficult for my suspension of disbelief to hold. At times, it felt like this device was used to keep the story moving along without needing to do anything further. (And there was a scene where he recreated his encounter with the boy in the bathroom that simply…took me entirely out of the story.)

In the same way, much of how this mysterious “man made of smoke” serial killer worked - both as our main character as a child and as an adult - felt, at times, too unbelievable. I’m unsure if it was too much focus on how no one wanted to look this man in the eyes when he went into public - despite him looking dirty, saying strange things, and dragging a child behind him that looked both dirty and terrified - or the absurdity of how the crimes are occurring as an adult. 

Finally, this story is told through the points of view of both Daniel and his father, John, but - unlike the chapters labeled with the name “James,” there is no distinction for which POV we are operating in. The first time this switch happened I was both extremely confused and assumed I remembered the main character’s name wrong, in all honesty. I also felt like having these multiple POVs gave us, as the reader, too much information that wasn’t present in our “main” character. At multiple points we are given information our other character doesn’t have, and so it makes watching him investigate something we already know a bit tedious to watch - and at times, unbelievable to see him come to some wild conclusions without access to the same information. 

And this isn’t anything too bad, but I felt like the reveal was a bit anticlimactic and did not explain anything that happened in the first half of the novel.

However, I can clearly see that I am not in the majority of my dislike for this novel and I would encourage anyone to check this out to see if you feel differently. It’s entirely possible I simply disliked this because reading this felt much less grounded in reality than I was expecting, and found the mysteriously almost-supernatural aspects a bit too ridiculous so they took me out of the story. 

Thank you to the author, NetGalley, and Celadon Books for providing this e-ARC.