Beautiful City of the Dead

July 3, 2006
In Watts's fantasy novel about gods and music, teenager Zee meets Relly on her first day of high school. Relly explains that he's inventing a whole new sound, Ghost Metal ("so loud it almost crushes your skull flat and inside the noise is a ghost"), with his band, Scorpio Bone. The author starts out by using music the way he does carving in Stonecutter, even down to the association with cemeteries. When Zee becomes Scorpio Bone's bass player, she gathers inspiration for her songs at a cemetery that Relly calls the Beautiful City of the Dead. But the plot quickly grows farfetched: after the band's debut, Relly disappears, and Zee finds him in an alley where he bursts into flames yet doesn't burn. Relly later explains that both he and Zee are gods that represent two of the four elements: Relly is fire, Zee is water. Together with the other two bandmates (earth and air) they form a tetrad. But Zee's bio teacher, Mr. Knacke, along with the school's principal and janitor-all gods themselves-have lost their water element and take desperate measures to compel Zee to fill the position. Watt's novel moves quickly and makes numerous references to 1970s rock bands, which some teens will enjoy. Unfortunately, the characters here are never fully developed, and readers do not learn how these gods came to be, nor does the author explain the gods' relationship with the real world. Ages 12-up.