Review: Geist Fleisch by Christian Baines

Title: Geist Fleisch

Author: Christian Baines

Length: 176 Pages

Category: Historical Fantasy, Paranormal

Rating: 5 Stars

At a Glance: Geist Fleisch is not only a fantastic peek into Baines’ imagination, but its historical setting adds a particular sense of dread to the story, and the human monsters that troll Berlin’s streets. It succeeded to engage my own imagination in all the ways I could have hoped for.

Reviewed By: Lisa

Blurb: Drawn by promises of excitement and freedom, how could Callum resist Berlin?

It’s the end of 1932 and the Weimar capital is the heartbeat of the gay world, where a man like him can find companionship and love, even in the shadow of looming political disaster.

Still, Callum feels unseen, until he discovers a place where the dead mix with the living, an organization devoted to studying the supernatural, and a man in each world that could capture his heart… or seal his fate.

Review: “Only in Berlin do the dead congregate in the way you’ve seen.”

Christian Baines’ Arcadia Trust is most familiar to his readers in a contemporary context. Geist Fleisch, on the other hand, is an introduction to its long history, which converges on the streets and in the nightclubs of a turbulent 1932 Berlin, just before Germany’s imminent fall to Hitler and his Nazis. The nightlife is decadent and the opportunity to participate abundant, giving the story a “Nero fiddling while Rome burns” tone.

What Callum experiences on his journey through this unfamiliar, uninhibited world, however, is beyond the realms of the natural world. His reality is about to be upended, and deciding whom to trust—if he can trust anyone—is complicated by fear of the unknown.

Geist Fleisch is not only a fantastic peek into Baines’ imagination, but its historical setting adds a particular sense of dread to the story, and the human monsters that troll Berlin’s streets, smugly frequenting its most wanton indulgences. Here, the horrors are of the flesh-and-blood variety, and danger is both of the natural and the supernatural sort. I was drawn in and entirely invested in what was becoming of Callum, with the shifts in his reality and the discovery of what he is to become. This remained as mysterious to him as it was to me as he navigated the inconceivable, and then the author added a heart-touching dollop of longing and desire, made all the more so for its futility.

Geist Fleisch succeeded to engage my own imagination in all the ways I could have hoped for, including making me excited to see where the other authors in the Haunted Hearts collection will take their own characters.