Book Review: Two Suns by Alan and Sairung Wright

Reviewed by Nick Gardner

Love conquers all, even the bizarre fantastical creatures from other realms.

Sheriff Sol Jefferson loves his wife, Yaya, more than anything. In their quiet island community of Webberley Island off the coast of Oregon, their mutual attachment to each other is easy, but when a red, seemingly invincible creature appears on the beach and begins murdering innocent people, their love is put to the test. While Sol and Yaya seek answers to this creature’s existence, their world is challenged and expanded to include other realms, new powers, and even dinosaurs.

Alan and Sairung Wright’s characters are without flaws, inherently good. While they battle demons, mages, and giant humanoid serpents, it’s easy to pick up who is good and who is evil. Sol, the sheriff, always does what’s right and is the voice of reason when his friend, Toby, for example, chooses to fight a creature using hand-to-hand combat rather than a gun. And Sol’s passion for Yaya, depicted as always kind and reasonable, draws him to her side as her protector for most of the book. Though their portrayal as absolute moral people may be simplistic, it makes the contrast more pronounced when the two are pitted against the seemingly incurable evils of other realms.

The novel begins with a bang, with a monster and murder on the second page, and the gore is a gut punch, filled with decapitations and slews of blood. After Sol sees a man cut open on the beach, the pacing is breakneck, each short chapter depicting a gruesome murder from shifting perspectives.

But the book takes a turn after the first fifty or so pages, moving into sci-fi and supernatural fields that are, for lack of a better word, totally weird. The realistic world of Webberley Island expands to involve otherworldly “realms” filled with creatures that sometimes resemble a child’s imaginative drawing brought to life. The descriptions of this other world are intriguing, unique, and easy to visualize, but some of it tones down the pacing with an abundance of worldbuilding. The pacing does pick up for the final third of the book, featuring action-packed showdowns between Yaya, Sol, and an increasingly imaginative series of murder-bent monsters.

The Wrights’ imagination sets Two Suns apart from other horror or thriller novels. If the reader isn’t too queasy from the gore, they may even see the humor in the creatures’ designs. With the humor, the horror, the science fiction, and the supernatural all rolled into one, Two Suns is a difficult one to categorize, but the read is easy, intriguing, and filled with enough strangeness to expand the limits of the fictive dream.

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