The Lower Power

It’s February of 1992 in New York City, and Raven has been clean for five years. She works as an advocate for those recently arrested on drug charges to be sent to rehab instead of jail while she works on going to law school. Raven begins having drug nightmares as she did when she first got clean, but these ones feature a sinister presence. After talking with others in recovery, she discovers multiple people are having these dreams, and many are relapsing. People who have been clean for twenty years are becoming mindless drug addicts who are committing senseless acts of violence. All of it seems to center around an abandoned building run by someone only known as “BG.” With so many people dying, Raven and her friends know they have to do something to stop The Lower Power plaguing the city. A reporter named Juan Miranda joins the fight, but how do you fight something so evil that seems unstoppable and offers what you fought so hard to quit? It will take everything this group has to save this city from an unrelenting darkness. This battle will come at great cost to all of them, but many of them have already paid the price of survival.

This is a violent, bloody take on the crack epidemic of the 90s. It was an interesting view of how drugs affect people in a worst-case scenario. The author does not shy away from what the life of an addict looks like. You can feel some of her own story coming through the pages as she has also overcome what many of the characters go through. It was eye-opening since I have no experience with anything in this book, and I was only seven when the events occurred. I can’t even begin to imagine what the life of an addict is like, though this book does seem to make it pretty clear. While it was incredibly dark and horrific, Michele Miller does a wonderful job of pointing out that there is still hope and places and people to seek out help. No one is irredeemable. Except for BG, but he’s probably the Devil, so what can you do? The hardest part was reading about what people were willing to do to get their next high and how young they seemed to be. I know it’s reality, but it doesn’t make it any less heartbreaking. Overall, if you can get past the language, abuse of any kind, and extreme gore, you will probably find this tale interesting. I would definitely recommend it to horror fans.