Review of the Soolie Beetch Trilogy by Skelly Harrington
By Malcolm Magee
A Journey Not Expected
The Soolie Beetch trilogy is a truly remarkable work by nouvel auteur Skelly Harrington. I have tried to compare it to other works for this review to clarify what the reader will find. But comparing it to other authors would diminish and pigeonhole it in ways it should not. Having read thousands of works in my increasingly long life, I find this trilogy unique.
This story, beneath its flowing prose, says something essential about being human. The author has chosen to tell this story in their own way and their own unique voice. It is a comforting horror. It is love and hate. It is confidence and terror. Its prose contains on each page the savage beauty that only life can give us. It is both fantasy and reality, and it touches the inner heart of anyone who has been damaged and provides hope to find freedom. Harrington holds some complicated philosophical and psychological concepts in delightful contradiction. Truth cannot be reconciled, and there is no balance sheet. You cannot paint life by the numbers; this author refuses those neat solutions.
At some point, the reader will find themselves carried away by the beauty of the prose itself. The words will transport you to another world outside of time, where monsters and broken angels battle for souls. Ultimately, it becomes a story about gaining agency over one’s own life.
Soolie Beetch is a journey. No doubt it may reflect, in some parts, the author’s journey, but it is in other ways the journey of everyman. Life journeys take us away from safety and the familiar. They literally and figuratively bring us into storms, wild beasts, and monsters. But they also show us the kindness of strangers, and we encounter artists and storytellers, suffering and triumph. Whatever we encounter, we must all take this journey if we wish to be free. (And freedom is too terrifying for some, so they refuse to go.) Soolie is on a journey to freedom. It is filled with the unexpected at every point, and the reader will find the plot, like life, multipolar and uncategorizable.
I hope anyone reading this review will also get and read this trilogy. Let it provoke you to your own journey. Find freedom from your monsters and fears. You have a life yet to live, and this may inspire you to live it.
Highly Recommended.
