Literature / The Crow: The Lazarus Heart

"Sometimes fairy tales come true"

The Crow: The Lazarus Heart is a 1998 novel written by Billy Martin, under the name Poppy Z. Brite. It is the second instalment in a series of six Crow Tie In Novels, being preceded by The Crow Quoth The Crow and proceeded by The Crow Clash By Night. It was reprinted in The Crow: A Murder of Crows, a 1998 Omnibus which also collected Quoth the Crow and Clash by Night.

A serial killer, dubbed The Bourbon Street Ripper, is preying on crossdressers, drag queens, and Transgender people in New Orleans. The Ripper's latest victim is Benjamin DuBois, the husband of a photographer named Jared A. Poe. Jared is blamed for Benny's death and all of the other murders by the largely bigoted police force, and after a joke of a trial, is condemned to death, though a few months into his sentence he is fatally shanked in prison by the brother of a man who was murdered by the real Bourbon Street Ripper.

Five days later, a crow resurrects Jared as the new Crow, so that he can avenge both himself and Benny. Aided by Benny's twin sister, Lucrece, Jared goes after his arresting officer, the District Attorney, and The Bourbon Street Ripper, who is revealed to be a psychotic Heteronormative Crusader named Jordan who is convinced that all "gender transgressors" are secretly Aliens Among Us.

The book is often cited as being the inspiration for the third Crow film, Salvation, even though the two stories have nothing in common and Poppy Z. Brite is not listed anywhere in the credits of Salvation (unlike Norman Partridge, the author of The Crow: Wicked Prayer, who is listed in the credits of the film version of Wicked Prayer).

Tropes:

• Abandoned Area: The climax takes place in an abandoned factory.
• Agent Scully: Aaron Marsh is a retired ornithologist and a man of science, which is why Lucrece goes to him for advice about the resurrected Jared instead of one of the many occultists or spiritualists who live in New Orleans.
  Lucrece: I know you won't just tell me what I want to hear, or listen to me and only hear what you want to hear.
• Affirmative-Action Legacy: Jared is the first gay Crow, while Lucrece is the first (and so far only) transgender Crow.
• The Alcoholic: Detective Gray, due to a combination of being an Armored Closet Gay and PTSD caused by the incident that crippled his ex-partner, Linda Getty.
• Alien Among Us: The villain believes that trans people (and possibly all LGBT people in general) are all alien perverts who are pretending to be human as a prelude to an Alien Invasion. He is also crazy, in case that is not obvious.
• Alien Invasion: Jordan's greatest fear, and what he is convinced he is preventing or at least delaying by killing the trangender people who he thinks are undercover alien agents or scouts. We get an instance of Storyboarding the Apocalypse via one of Jordan's nightmares, which involves an "androgyne" contagion, a burning sky, descending warships, and all trans people assuming their true alien forms, which are some kind of Blob Monsters.
• Always Night: Either that, or it is so overcast and rainy that it might as well be night. About the only sunny scenes are the ones that are set in the Angola State Prison.
• Amoral Attorney: The District Attorney is a bigot who once backed David Duke.
• Angry Collar Grab: Lucrece uses her new, crow-bestowed superhuman strength to do this to Jordan.
• Apologetic Attacker: When he finishes cutting Michele up, Jordan, instead of killing Michele violently like all of his other victims, just injects her with something lethal while muttering, "Forgive me."
• Armored Closet Gay: Detective Gray, though it does eat him up inside, to the point that he is sometimes unable to look at himself in the mirror because "there would be only the mask, no vestige left of the man hiding underneath."
• Artistic License – Gun Safety: Detective Unger leaves his holster just hanging from a coat hook with a fully-loaded gun in it.
• Attack the Mouth: Jared shoots Detective Unger in the mouth.
• Badass Bystander: While Jared is taunting John Henry Harrod, the prostitute who John was having sex with attacks Jared with a shotgun as Jared incredulously exclaims, "Jesus Christ, Harrod. Where'd you find this bitch?"
• Bad Cop/Incompetent Cop: The police are all apathetic and/or corrupt, with Detective Gray, his ex-partner, Linda Getty, and maybe his new partner, Detective Thibodeaux, as the Token Good Teammates.
• Batter Up!: Benny and Lucrece were once saved from a pair of bullies by a baseball bat-wielding Great Aunt Isolde.
• Battle in the Rain: The finale takes placing during a raging hurricane.
• Bazaar of the Bizarre: The Eye of Horus, an ornithology shop that is run by Aaron Marsh. It only sells bird-related merchandise like feathers, preserved eggs, taxidermized birds, and bird skeletons.
• Big Bad Ensemble: Jordan is the main villain, but Jared also has grudges against Detective Unger and John Henry Harrod.
• The Big Easy: The book is set in New Orleans, which is portrayed as a Vice City.
• Big Good: The ancient crow that Lucrece sees in the Dark World, "a crow so black, so impossibly enormous that he might have been the very first, the incarnation of age clothed in ragged black feathers."
• Bigot with a Badge: All of them, except for Detective Gray, his ex-partner, Linda Getty, and maybe his new partner, Detective Thibodeaux.
• Bitch in Sheep's Clothing: Detective Unger is not an open bigot like his associates, and acts professional during Jared's arrest and interrogation, asking Jared if he wants a lawyer, and making sure that Jared was read his Miranda Rights. But when Jared, as the Crow, confronts Unger, Unger makes it clear that he never really cared if Jared was actually guilty of murdering Benny, sneering, "What difference does it make? Even if we didn't get the killer, we got another sicko off the street, right?"
• Black-and-White Insanity: While Jordan does have the occasional minor crisis of conscious, for the most part he wholeheartedly believes that his victims are all aliens or in some way connected to them, which means that they must die.
• Blackmail Backfire: A young prostitute threatens to out Detective Gray while mugging him, which prompts Gray to fly into a rage and give the boy a No-Holds-Barred Beatdown.
• Blood Is Squicker in Water: Jordan dumps Michele's remains in a fountain in Audubon Park.
• Body Horror:
  • Jared's resurrection, which entails all of his stitches coming undone, and then his body violently expelling four gallons of embalming fluid from his various incisions and orifices, the former of which are then healed (along with his desiccated organs) by his new Healing Factor.
  • Lucrece was disemboweled, so her resurrection is even worse, with all of her spilled blood and organs being sucked back into her as Jordan looks on in horror and Screams Like a Little Girl.
• Book Ends: The book opens with Jared waking up in Lafayette Cemetery, and ends with him returning there with Lucrece and reuniting with Benny before they all Go into the Light.
• Boom, Headshot!: One of Jordan's victims, Roy, and Detective Gray are all killed by gunshots to the head, with Roy being subject to a Double Tap. Jared also sustains a shot to the head (not that it matters much, him being a Crow and all) during his confrontation with John Henry Harrod.
• Camera Fiend: Jared was a photographer, taking pictures of things like weddings and baby showers to pay the rent, and gothic architecture and people for his art.
• Career-Ending Injury: Detective Gray's ex-partner, Linda Getty, left the force after she sustained a serious wound to the thigh courtesy of a crackhead named Roy.
• Carved Mark: After Benny's death, Lucrece tried to get a large scar of a raven on her back, to remember him by, but the person who carved the scar was less than competent, and carved a crow into Lucrece's back instead. The mark fortuitously grants Lucrece telepathy, and gives her the power to force the crows to return her to life to save Jared from Jordan.
• Cast Full of Gay: Most of the characters are gay, including the new Crow.
• Celebrity Resemblance: Lucrece compares Aaron Marsh to "a slightly deranged Walt Whitman."
• Chained to a Bed: Benny was taken apart while tied to his own bed, with his hands and feet remaining bound to the bedposts while the rest of him was strewn around his and Jared's bedroom.
• Childhood Brain Damage: Jordan was struck by lightning when he was 8. He believes that the lightning imbued him with some kind of secret knowledge or sixth sense (taking his name in exchange) when in reality all it appears to have done is given him brain damage (just touching his mind notably gives Lucrece Convulsive Seizures due to how chaotic a "white hot crucible" of electricity it is) while also messing up his body chemistry to the point that he makes watches and compasses go haywire with his very presence. When a Magical Negro lady acquaintance offered to help restore Jordan to normal after sensing that he had been screwed up, Jordan's mother blew her off, even though deep down she knew that the woman was probably on to something, as Jordan had been acting weird and off-putting ever since the accident, which Jordan never told his family about, leaving them puzzled by his sudden changes in behavior.
• Cigarette of Anxiety: The stress of his job, and especially the Benny crime scene, has made a chain smoker out of Detective Unger.
• Colourful Theme Naming: Detective Frank Gray. Fitting, given that he is kind of The Eeyore.
• Companion Cube: Aaron Marsh's taxidermied Dodo bird. It is the only thing that he takes with him during the evacuation of New Orleans.
• Conspiracy Theorist: Jordan, something that is made abundantly clear by the scene where he randomly starts demanding that a confused captive answer his questions about the Roswell incident.
• Cop Killer: Jared kills one of his arresting officers, Detective Unger, while Jordan kills Detective Gray.
• The Coroner: Pam Tierney, an Irishwoman and Butch Lesbian. The police hate her and she hates the police, seeing them as little more than a Necessarily Evil.
• Courtroom Antics: A brawl breaks out during Jared's trial, sparked by volleying insults between Lucrece and John Henry Harrod.
• Crash in Through the Ceiling: Jared smashes his way through John Henry Harrod's skylight to get to John, and later does the same with a factory skylight to get to Jordan.
• Creepy Cemetery: Lafayette Cemetery, the old graveyard where the crow resurrects Jared.
• Creepy Jazz Music: The serial killer only listens to jazz because it is "the only music he's relatively certain is free of Their influence."
• Creepy Twins: Benny and Lucrece are nice people, but they sometimes play this up, like during their first photo shoot with Jared.
• Criminal Mind Games:
  • Jordan leaves passages taken from The Raven at the Benny and Michele crime scenes, as a threat to his imagined enemies. The calculations that were used to select the quotes were completely arbitrary, though, so they only cause confusion, with Jordan himself probably not even knowing exactly what he is trying to say with them.
  • Later, he more straightforwardly makes a telephone call to Detective Gray, and sends him running all over town, collecting notes with addresses (and, in one case, a finger) in them in order to lure Gray into a trap.
• Curious Qualms of Conscience: Jordan at one point admits that he does in fact sometimes question and feel bad about what he is doing, but he buries this under the psychotic delusion that his feelings of compassion and remorse are not actually real, but rather the result of pheromones that his victims have been genetically-engineered to secrete as a defense mechanism.
• Dark World: The Land of the Crow, a dour and eternally misty realm that appears to consist of nothing but an Enchanted Forest.
• Defective Detective: Detective Gray is an Armored Closet Gay and The Alcoholic who probably also has PTSD.
• Destination Defenestration: A crackhead throws a baby through a window and onto the street, where it is run over by a car.
• Deus ex Machina: Lucrece having a crow scar (even though she told the body modder to give her a raven one) grants her telepathy, and the power to force the crows to bring her back to life to save Jared from Jordan.
• Disposable Sex Worker: The vast majority of Jordan's victims are sex workers, with his first known victim being a crossdressing hustler named Josie.
• Disposable Vagrant: A lot of the victims are also homeless, like Michele.
• Dramatic Drop: Jared dropped his groceries when he found Benny dead.
• Dressed All in Rubber: A lot of characters, including the main one, wear a lot of latex, leather, and PVC. Jared even ends up trading his Monster Clown mask in for a bondage hood after killing Detective Unger and John Henry Harrod.
• Driven to Suicide:
  • Detective Norris, unable to get over the horror of the Benny crime scene and plagued by visions and nightmares of crows, committed suicide by slitting his own throat with a broken piece of mirror.
  • After being informed of Jared's death, Lucrece nearly committed suicide with a straight razor, but instead just resorted to Self-Harm.
• Earn Your Happy Ending: The story concludes with Jared and Lucrece moving on to the afterlife after reuniting with Benny in Lafayette Cemetery. Jared is also posthumously cleared of being The Bourbon Street Ripper.
• Eerie Pale-Skinned Brunette: Benny and Lucrece are chalk white with hair like black satin, at least according to Jared.
• Effeminate Voice: Jordan's voice is strangely girly, so much so that Detective Gray, upon hearing it for the first time, assumes that Jordan is using a Voice Changeling.
• Even Evil Has Standards:
  • Jordan finds the concept of Creepy Souvenirs to be tawdry and tasteless, and makes it clear that he only preserves and keeps pieces of his victims so that he can study them For Science! (he thinks that they are aliens or people who have been implanted with viruses and Nano Machines). He also notes, after shooting Detective Gray, that he had never before killed anyone who did not display any "symptoms" or tangible connections to Them, which indicates an adherence to some kind of standard or code like Thou Shalt Not Kill Muggles (he does, after all, think that he is fighting alien invaders on humanity's behalf).
  • The police are almost all bigoted assholes who demean and brutalize gay people for fun, but even they were disgusted and disturbed by what was done to Benny.
• Excrement Statement: Linda Getty's bigoted fellow officers taunted her by leaving used tampons taped to her locker, which they also defaced with the word "Dyke."
• Explosive Instrumentation: A weather satellite's reaction to the crow-like formations in Hurricane Michael.
  At 5:03 P.M. a weather satellite in geostationary orbit twenty-two thousand miles above the Gulf sends back color images of another shadow, an India-ink-black smudge that will eventually be described in an internal NHC report as "the crow anomaly." Less than thirty seconds later the satellite's computer vomits a frantic, senseless stream of data and shuts itself down.
• Eye Scream: Michele has her eyelids removed by Jordan.
• Failure Is the Only Option: The old adage that insanity is "doing the same thing over and over again and expecting a different result" perfectly applies to Jordan, who is completely and utterly unwilling to accept that he will never get the answers or evidence that he is looking for—no matter how many people he threatens, tortures, mutilates, murders, dissects, or vivisects in an attempt to get them—because there are no answers and there is no evidence, just a crazy man's delusions about a nonexistent Alien Invasion.
• Faking the Dead: Rather than go into foster care, Benny and Lucrece instead chose to fake their own deaths by nailing a suicide note to a tree before burning down their Great Aunt Isolde's mansion.
• Fantastic Fragility: Jared was brought back to life to get revenge on Jordan, and only Jordan. Jared killing Detective Unger and John Henry Harrod weakens him, and makes him too slow to save Lucrece or Detective Gray from Jordan.
• Finger in the Mail: Jordan leaves a finger in a note for Detective Gray, to show Gray that he is serious.
• Flashback B-Plot: The main plot, which opens with Jared returning to life, is frequently interrupted by flashbacks to the events leading up to Jared's death.
• Fork Fencing: Jared was stabbed to death with a spoon that was sharpened into a shiv.
• Frame-Up:
  • Jordan let Jared take the fall for Benny's murder, which led to Jared being accused of being The Bourbon Street Ripper.
  • Near the end, Jordan kills Detective Gray and frames him for the post-Benny deaths, including the murder of Lucrece. The epilogue indicates that this would not have worked due to factors like the inconsistent handwriting of Gray's "confession" and there being plenty of people who could alibi Gray.
• Freak Out: Upon returning home after being resurrected, Jared loses it for a bit, trashing objects, rambling semi-coherently, attempting to attack his crow, and arguing and fighting with Lucrece.
• Freudian Excuse: Jordan suffered Childhood Brain Damage when he was struck by lightning when he was 8. He never told anyone about the incident, but his family and friends could still tell that there was now something wrong with him, and while this worried them, they never did anything about it, going by how adamantly Jordan's mother refused help when it was offered by a Magical Negro lady acquaintance who could sense that there was now something off about Jordan, who she said she could return to normal by driving the newly gestating "bad" out of him with the help of a Voodoo practitioner.
• Go into the Light: After Lucrece dies, she finds herself in a void, with a comforting glow in the distance, which she rejects in favor of returning to Earth as a Crow.
• Good Cop/Bad Cop: Detective Unger (good) and Detective Norris (bad) while interrogating Jared.
• Gorn: The villains commits all manner of torture and mutilation, but even beyond that we get a woman shot in half, a head blown off by a shotgun, and a baby thrown through a window and onto the street, where it is run over by a car.
• Goth: Benny and Lucrece. Jared, in his first meeting with them, opines that they looked like "some fetish freak's vision of Jonathan and Mina Harker."
• Gratuitous Rape: Jordan responds to Lucrece's attempt to enter his mind by raping her while she is unconscious, something which he admits he has never done or even felt the urge to do before, but must now, as retaliation for the attempted Mind Rape. The incident is not brought up again afterward.
• The Greatest Story Never Told: This is how Jordan views his crusade against the nonexistent Alien Invasion.
  To be a soldier in an army of light and blood so secret that there can never be any acknowledgment of his achievements or failures, not even the most fleeting contact with his brothers and sisters in arms, for fear of discovery. The invaders are everywhere, and Their agents are everywhere. A moment of weakness, one slip, could mean much, much more than the mere loss of his life.
• Groin Attack: Jared, during his post-resurrection Freak Out, is kneed in the crotch by Lucrece.
• Grumpy Old Man: Aaron Marsh, the self-admittedly "selfish" ornithologist who Lucrece consults about the resurrected Jared.
• Gutted Like a Fish: Jordan disembowels Lucrece, whose remains are later found on display by Detective Gray.
• Half the Man He Used to Be: A crackhead shoots a woman in half with a high-powered shotgun during a gun battle with Detective Gray.
• Has a Type: Jared had a thing for "well-muscled submissives" until he met Benny.
• Hate Sink: While Jordan is horrible, it is because of brain damage-induced psychosis, unlike John Henry Harrod and most of the story's police officers, who are all lucid and sane and all the more hateable for it because their bigotry does not stem from psychotic delusions, but rather plain old Jerk Assery.
• Heteronormative Crusader: Jordan and John Henry Harrod, the former due to madness, and the latter due to being a glorified Neo-Nazi.
• How We Got Here: As Jared returns to life, we get flashbacks of his death, his sentencing, his arrest, and him finding what is left of Benny.
• Icy Gray Eyes: Jordan and John Henry Harrod, with the former being a mix of this and Icy Blue Eyes.
• If You Kill Him, You Will Be Just Like Him!: Lucrece tries to pull this on Jared to get him to leave John Henry Harrod alone, but Jared brushes it off, laughing, "Get a clue, babe. Haven't you looked in a mirror lately? We're all monsters."
• I Have Many Names: Jordan has been dubbed The Bourbon Street Ripper by the media, and also goes by various other names, like Joseph Lethe and Stanley Hudson. It is implied that none of these names are his real one, and that he is incapable of remembering what his birth name actually is.
• I Just Want to Be Normal: Jordan sometimes spends hours crying hysterically in a dark room, lamenting that his "fearful work has changed him forever" and that he can "never return to the simple, painless life he lived before."
• I'll Kill You!: Fed up with John Henry Harrod badgering Lucrece, Jared lunges for him while screaming that he will kill him in a definite instance of Not Helping Your Case.
• I'm Having Soul Pains: The crow experiences intense pain as it resurrects Jared.
• Insane Troll Logic: Jordan runs on this, at one point noting that Lucrece having her sex reassignment surgery in Trinidad, Chicago might have something to do with Area 51 simply because "It is approximately 260 miles due south from Trinidad, Colorado, to Roswell, New Mexico."
• Insane Equals Violent: Jordan's psychosis, which was implicitly never treated in any way, is severe enough that it drives him to acts of extraordinary violence and cruelty.
• Insanity Immunity: Jordan's brain is so scrambled and cross-wired that Lucrece's attempt at entering his mind via her crow-adjacent telepathy goes about as well as someone jamming a fork into an electrical outlet, with it also being implied that this bad body chemistry is why Jordan is somehow invisible to Jared's crow.
• Instant Sedation: Michele immediately goes down after being injected with something by Jordan.
• Insult Backfire: After Lucrece spits on him and calls him a sick and hateful son of a bitch, John Henry Harrod responds with, "That means a lot, Ms. DuBois. Coming as it does from a confirmed sodomite such as yourself."
• "It" Is Dehumanizing: Jordan, convinced that his victims are not human or no longer are, refers to them exclusively with terms like "it" and "They" and "Them."
• Joggers Find Death: Michele's corpse was discovered by a man walking his Chihuahua.
• Karma Houdini: The prison guard who let the Cuban murder Jared. There is also the Cuban himself, who Jared decided to just leave be, due to sympathizing with the man and the anger and grief and that drove him to kill who he thought was The Bourbon Street Ripper.
• Kick the Morality Pet: In a fit of anger, Jared starts dead-naming Lucrece, repeatedly calling her Lucas.
• Kids Are Cruel: Benny and Lucrece were bullied throughout their childhood, due to being raised in isolation by their spinster hermit aunt, Isolde.
• Large and in Charge: The lead crow is the size of a vulture.
• Lightning Reveal: This occurs right before Detective Unger is attacked by Jared.
• Lonely Funeral: The priest aside, no one attended Great Aunt Isolde's funeral besides Benny and Lucrece. Benny and Jared's funerals were similarly empty.
• Ludicrous Gibs: Jared's crow gets shot to bits by Jordan.
• Madness Mantra: After he lets slip that he was struck by lightning when he was 8 during a conversation with Detective Gray, Jordan spends the next several minutes repeating, "I was struck..." Later, he becomes prone to repeating, "I am the river..."
• Magical Negro: Growing up, Jordan knew one named Julianna. She sold tomatoes, and offered to help restore Jordan to normal through Voodoo after sensing that a lightning strike had made it so that there was now "something bad" inside of Jordan.
• Mask of Sanity: Jordan, barely. His family being estranged, him having no social life, and his lack of a need for a job (due to being able to live off of the sale of inherited land) means that no one is around him long enough to notice that there is something seriously wrong with him.
• Maybe Magic, Maybe Mundane: It is implied that there may have been something otherworldly, possibly even demonic, about the lightning that struck Jordan when he was 8. Jordan is convinced that the lightning took his name in exchange for knowledge, while a Magical Negro believed that the lightning implanted Jordan with gestating evil that could be driven out of Jordan through Voodoo. The crow is supposed to know who Jordan is, but something is wrong and causing it to lack that knowledge, and when Lucrece tries to enter Jordan's mind, she is more or less attacked and driven out of it by a flurry of electricity that seemed alive, like "a serpent made of living fire."
  Jordan: It [Lucrece] had been reading his very thoughts, his soul. But there was something there it hadn't expected, something that shielded and protected him from its prying, alien attention. Something that struck back and left it helpless, unconscious, maybe even dead.
• The Mentally Disturbed: Jordan. He believes that all trans people (and possibly all LGBT people in general) are aliens (possibly from Area 51) that are full of things like Nano Machines and genetically-engineered pheromones, has covered his radio in tinfoil and runes to prevent it from being compromised by malevolent telepathic waves and cosmic rays, is constantly going on about how he has to protect himself from invasive viruses and nanites, suffers bouts of hysteria during which he cries for hours on end in a dark room while rambling about how his purpose and destiny were decided for him before he was even born and how he can never go back to how his life was before his "work" changed him, etc. His obvious paranoid schizophrenia (and God knows how many other disorders) is indicated to stem from brain damage incurred from being struck by lightning when he was 8, and one victim outright states that Jordan's behavior reminds him of other "crazy" people who he has encountered on the streets of New Orleans.
• Minority Police Officer: The main detective is a closeted gay man, while his old partner was a lesbian and African-American.
• Monster Clown: Jared wears a stark white Mardi Gras harlequin mask while killing Detective Unger and John Henry Harrod.
• My Car Hates Me: John Henry Harrod's car refuses to work when he tries to flee from Jared in it, having seemingly been sabotaged by Jared's crow.
• Never Found the Body: Jordan and Detective Gray's corpses are found after Hurricane Michael, but not Jared or Lucrece's bodies, the two having entered the afterlife after reuniting with Benny's spirit at Lafayette Cemetery.
• No-Holds-Barred Beatdown: When a young prostitute threatens to out him in the middle of a mugging, Detective Gray flies into a rage, punching the boy in the face and slamming his head into a bathroom stall door before kicking him in the stomach and the face while screaming, "You stupid little shit. If I ever see you again... if I ever so much as fuckin' see you again, motherfucker, they'll be dragging the river for the parts the alligators didn't want. Do you understand me?"
• No Name Given: The man who killed Jared is just called the Cuban.
• Noodle Implements: Jordan's tools include ones that he could not buy anywhere and had to make himself "because no one's ever needed them before."
• Nothing Personal: A fellow officer coldly tells Detective Gray this, after the force had left Gray and his partner, Linda Getty, to fend for themselves during a volatile situation, all because Linda was gay.
• Obliviously Evil: Jordan's victims are all innocent people, but in his psychotic, lightning-fried mind they are deviant extraterrestrials who must be destroyed as gruesomely as possible and through any means necessary as punishment for invading the Earth for the purpose of perverting its gender norms. His lack of evidence (something which he rationalizes by telling himself that it must be programmed to disintegrate or teleport away to avoid discovery) and inability to get his victims to talk (no matter what he does to them) about the Roswell incident or "The Cabal" or "The Invasion" (which he dreams involves an "androgyne contagion" and the sky on fire as warships descend) does little to dissuade his psychosis, with any doubts that he does have about his actions (he at one point asks a victim to forgive him as he is killing them) being chalked up to the mind-altering chemicals that he deludedly claims his victims have been genetically engineered to produce as a means of confusing attackers. He briefly feels awkward after murdering Detective Gray because, in his own mind, he has never killed a "normal" human before, just aliens and people who had been compromised or corrupted by them via things like Nano Machines, though he is able to get over it by reassuring himself that Gray being a homosexual meant that he was like or involved with "Them." He is just an insane (to the point that Lucrece has a violent seizure when she tries to reach into his mind) serial killer, but he genuinely sees himself and others like him (who he is convinced exist, yet does not seek out for fear of exposing himself to the enemy, who is everywhere) as draftees in a secret "army of light and blood" who are diligently working from the shadows to thwart an Alien Invasion.
  Jordan: Things fall from the sky. Shining, bleeding things fall from the sky and the fabric of humanity itself is altered. And They expect me to watch and do nothing? Did They really think that not a single man would stand against Them?
• Old, Dark House: Benny and Lucrece were raised in a "rambling derelict" of a mansion that predated the Civil War.
• Parental Abandonment: Benny and Lucrece's mother ran off to Pensacola with a travelling evangelist, and left them with their Great Aunt Isolde.
• Pistol-Whipping: This is how Jared breaks Detective Unger's nose.
• Poke in the Third Eye: Attempting to enter Jordan's mind causes Lucrece to have Convulsive Seizures and hallucinations due to Jordan's Insanity Immunity.
• Police Are Useless: They are almost all bigots who cause more problems than they solve, and even the main one ends up dying having accomplished absolutely nothing.
• Politically Incorrect Villain: The villains are all racist, sexist, homophobic, transphobic, or some combination thereof.
• Porn Stash: Detective Gray has one in a locked strongbox in the back of his closet, and takes every possible precaution to keep it secret, having his magazines and videos mailed to a post office box that he rents under an assumed name in Bridge City.
• Post Humous Character: Benny only appears in flashbacks, having been killed before the events of the story by Jordan.
• Protagonist-Centered Morality: Jared deliberately goes after targets that are explicitly not covered by a crow's plan of vengeance (that applies to Jordan and Jordan alone) on the basis of them being homophobic and transphobic assholes, despite pervious entries in the franchise making it clear that a person revived may only go after their direct assailants.
• Psychic Link: Lucrece is able to see and communicate with Jared through his crow, thanks to her crow scar and one of the crow's feathers.
• Psychic Nosebleed: Communicating with Jared telepathically through Jared's crow leaves Lucrece with nausea and vertigo that is so bad that she is left wondering, "Christ, maybe I broke something in my brain."
• Punk in the Trunk: Jordan stuffs Michele's remains into his trunk, and then dumps them in Audubon Park.
• Race Fetish: John Henry Harrod cheats on his wife exclusively with Latina and African-American women.
• Rape as Backstory: Michelle ran away from home because she was being sexually abused by her Wicked Stepfather.
• Rape Discretion Shot: Jordan raping the unconscious Lucrece occurs "off-page."
• Rain of Blood: Benny's remains were discovered when his blood started seeping through the floor and into the ceiling of Mrs. Poche's apartment.
• Raised by Grandparents: Benny and Lucrece were raised by their Grant Aunt Isolde.
• Reluctant Psycho: Michele overhears Jordan whisper "Forgive me" as she is being killed by Jordan, who admits that he sometimes experiences Villainous BSODs during which he just sits in a dark room and cries, partly because he feels like his life and destiny were decided for him before he was even born, and partly "for the loss of himself" because he "knows that he is no longer like other men, that some part of his fearful work has changed him forever and he can never return to the simple, painless life he lived before." He tries to rationalize these feelings of compassion, reluctance, and remorse as not being real, but rather the effects of pheromones that his victims have been genetically-engineered to produce as a defense mechanism.
• Resurrection Sickness: Jordan feels completely disoriented and sick for a while after being brought back to life as the new Crow.
• Riddle for the Ages: How did Jared and his crow sneak in and out of the police station washroom to confront Detective Gray?
  Jared: It's a long story, and believe me, you wouldn't buy it if I did tell you.
• Rise from Your Grave: Jared was resurrected five days after his death, so he wakes up in a coffin in a mausoleum in Lafayette Cemetery.
• Room Full of Crazy: A windowless room in Jordan's house is full of nothing but notebooks that contain all of Jordan's deranged writings.
• Rule of Three: The crow pecks exactly three times on Jared's mausoleum to resurrect Jared.
• The Schizophrenia Conspiracy: Jordan is a rather textbook case of this, as shown above under The Mentally Disturbed and Obliviously Evil.
• Screams Like a Little Girl: John Henry Harrod, right before he gets killed by Jared.
• Serial Killer:
  • Jordan is a particularly nasty and prolific one nicknamed The Bourbon Street Ripper, and is a combination of Mission-Oriented (he targets a specific subset of people who offend his sensibilities) and Visionary (he believes those people to be literally inhuman entities who are part of a vast global conspiracy).
  • One of Jared's death row cellmates was Hector Montoni, a pedophile who videotaped himself raping twelve children, three of whom he killed, in Baton Rouge and Biloxi.
• Shrine to the Fallen: Lucrece has converted Benny and Jared's bedroom into one of these, filling it with candles and photographs, most of them from Jared's first art show with Benny and Lucrece.
• Shoot the Shaggy Dog: Detective Gray, despite getting multiple chapters focused on him, accomplishes absolutely nothing before being anticlimactically killed by Jordan.
• Slashed Throat: Detective Norris, traumatized by the Benny crime scene and haunted by crows, committed suicide by slitting his own throat with a broken piece of mirror.
• Spiteful Spit: Lucrece spits on John Henry Harrod during Jared's trail, and calls him a "sick, hateful son of a bitch."
• Spit-Trail Kiss: One of these forms when Benny kisses Lucrece in front of Jared.
• Split Personality: Downplayed. Jordan reacts to stress by mentally retreating and assuming a new persona, but all of his identities are exactly the same except for their names, which include Joseph Lethe and Stanley Hudson. Despite this, he does appear to consider himself a different person whenever he swaps names, going by his dialogue during his face-to-face conversation with Detective Gray.
  Detective Gray: This doesn't even make sense, Lethe.
  Jordan: I'm Jordan now.
• Steven Ulysses Perhero: The new Crow is named Jared Poe.
• Straight Edge Evil: John Henry Herrod wears a condom while sodomizing a prostitute, so he believes in safe sex, if nothing else.
• Strapped to an Operating Table: The unfortunate fate of the victims who get taken home by Jordan.
• Straw Hypocrite: John Henry Harrod presents himself as a devout Christian and someone who stands for good moral values, when in reality he is just a White supremacist and David Duke supporter who hypocritically cheats on his wife with Latina and African-American women.
• Super Loser: Jared kills two people who he was not supposed to, which weakens him and makes him too slow to save Lucrece or Detective Gray. When he finally does confront Jordan, his crow is killed before he can even do anything, turning him back into a vulnerable mortal who gets shot several times by Jordan, who would have done worse had Lucrece not come back to life to save Jared and stop Jordan.
• Super Window Jump: Jared jumps through a lot of windows during his Roaring Rampage of Revenge.
• Talking Animal: Jared's crow never talks, but the one that brings Lucrece back does, though only in the Land of the Crow.
• Tattooed Crook: The convict who murdered Jared had a .35 Magnum tattooed on one arm, and the Virgin Mary tattooed on the other.
• Teacher/Student Romance: Aaron Marsh lost his job as an ornithology professor after a male student who he had flunked got revenge by revealing that he had been in a relationship with Aaron.
• Teeth Flying: Lucrece smacks Jordan so hard that his front teeth "snap off at the gum line."
• That Man Is Dead:
  Detective Gray: This doesn't even make sense, Lethe.
  Jordan: I'm Jordan now.
• This Cannot Be!: Jordan loses it when he realizes that the Crow is Jared, who is supposed to have died in Angola State Prison.
• Thou Shalt Not Kill Muggles: Even though Detective Gray's homosexuality disgusted him, Jordan still feels awkward about murdering him, as he had never killed an innocent "normal" human before, just ones whose "gender transgressions" he took to be a sign of "Them." After briefly mulling it over, Jordan reassures himself that Gray's homosexuality meant that he was like "Them."
• Through the Eyes of Madness: We get several scenes from Jordan's point-of-view that expound upon his delusions, like his belief that the actions of his victims are dictated by Nano Machines that are designed to teleport away or self-destruct to avoid detection.
• Title Drop: We get two references to the newly-undead Jared's "Lazarus heart."
• Tongue Trauma: Jordan is introduced having cut the tongue out of a victim named Marjory Marie West.
• The Tooth Hurts: Detective Unger's teeth are chipped and broken when his own gun is jammed into his mouth by Jared.
• Torture Porn: Downplayed. The book is full of torture, but it is not really all that prominent, with the emphasis being more on the gory aftermath.
• Torture Technician: Jordan tortures his victims in an attempt to get them to divulge information about the Alien Invasion, which of course never works because it is all in his head, so all that he is really doing is trying to force people to reinforce his delusions, and when that inevitably fails, he resorts to vivisecting them in an attempt to find evidence—any evidence at all—of extraterrestrial origin in their bodies.
• Tropical Epilogue: The epilogue reveals that Aaron Marsh used the insurance money gained from his shop's destruction during Hurricane Michael to retire to Amsterdam. A crow gives him a note from Lucrece that reads, "Sometimes fairy tales come true", a reference to an earlier conversation in which Aaron had insisted to Lucrece that there was nothing to the mythology of the crows and that it is all just "fairy tales."
• True Art Is Incomprehensible: Jared met Benny and Lucrece at a performing arts show which consisted solely of a man in an old alligator hide and expensive-looking loafers reading aloud from The Wall Street Journal.
• Twincest: Benny and Lucrece kiss intimately, and Lucrece watches Benny have sex with Jared after Jared turns down their implied offer of Three-Way Sex. It is not clear if Benny and Lucrece have actually had sex with just each other, though, especially since John Henry Harrod insinuating that this was the case clearly upset Lucrece.
• Twofer Token Minority: Detective Gray's ex-partner, Linda Getty, was gay and African-American.
• Undignified Death: Jared and Lucrece throw Jordan to the floor and stomp on him until he dies.
• Unwitting Instigator of Doom: Jordan might not have grown up to be a schizoid serial killer if his mother had heeded Julianna's advice and gotten him treatment, either mainstream or alternative (like the Voodoo that Julianna had suggested).
• Used to Be a Sweet Kid: Jordan was apparently an entirely normal boy up until his brain was fried by lightning, after which his family and friends could not help but notice that he had become, well, weird.
• Vice City: New Orleans is overrun with corruption, violence, crime, bigotry, and urban decay, and is portrayed as an all-around Hellhole. The police station's tap water is even described as being brown, something which is treated as normal.
• Villainous Cheekbones: John Henry Harrod is a bigot whose face "is narrow, pinched, with hollow, hungry cheeks."
• Vomiting Cop:
  • Three of the officers who found Benny's remains threw up, and while one was able to hold his lunch down, the crime scene still made him Green Around the Gills.
  • Detective Thibodeaux vomits at the sight of Michele's body, while Detective Gray just gets Green Around the Gills.
• Walking Techbane: Being struck by lightning when he was 8 messed with Jordan's body chemistry, making it so that he cannot use watches or compasses.
• Well-Intentioned Extremist: Jordan is repulsive in practically every way and a sick murderer of the innocent, but also a brain damaged madman who is so totally consumed by delusions that he legitimately does not see what he is doing as wrong because, in his eyes, what he is doing is warring against literally inhuman and otherworldly forces on Earth's behalf.
  Jordan: On the table, it watches him, this sexless creature that would hide itself in the world of men and women, the black and white world of opposites and opposition. He knows it is not merely evil, knows that's the sort of shit a crazy man might think. There is no evil. Rather, it is alien, viral, and he must be careful in his cam­paign if he is to succeed. If the world is to be free of these monstrosities once and for all.
• White Mask of Doom: Jared wears a stark white Mardi Gras harlequin mask while killing Detective Unger and John Henry Harrod.
• Wicked Stepmother: One of Jordan's victims ran away from home because she was being abused, physically and sexually, by her stepfather, who justified the abuse with drunken sputters of, "It ain't no different than the way the world's gonna treat you. It ain't no different than the goddamn world."
• Would Hurt a Child:
  • The worst call that Detective Gray ever responded to involved a crackhead who had thrown a baby out the window and onto the street, where it was run over by a car.
  • One of Jared's death row cellmates raped twelve children, murdering three of them, in Baton Rouge and Biloxi.
• Wrong Genre Savvy: Jordan sees himself as waging a one-man war to defend Earth's sexual morality against perverted alien invaders who have disguised themselves as humans (science fiction protagonist, sort of like a twisted puritanical version of John Nada or the Animorphs) when in reality he is just an insane serial killer who is murdering random LGBT people (crime or horror thriller villain).
• You Killed My Father: Jared was murdered in prison by the brother of a man who was killed by the real Bourbon Street Ripper.
• You Need a Breath Mint: Jordan's breath is described as smelling terrible, like "rotten vegetables and wintergreen mints."
• You Wouldn't Believe Me If I Told You: When Detective Gray asks Jared how Jared and his crow got into the police station washroom, Jared just shrugs and says, "It's a Long Story, and believe me, you wouldn't buy it if I did tell you."
• Your Head A-Splode: John Henry Harrod's head is completely annihilated by a shotgun blast to the face, courtesy of Jared.

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