History Tropers / CL

* Available {{Tie In Novel}}s:

* Available {{Tie-In Novel}}s:

* ''Literature/FridayThe13thHateKillRepeat'' (2005) by Jason Arnopp

TBA

[[quoteright:252:https://static.tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pub/images/thecrowthelazarusheart.jpg]]

''The Crow: The Lazarus Heart'' is a 1998 novel written by Creator/BillyMartin (as Poppy Z. Brite). It is the second instalment in a series of six ''[[Franchise/TheCrow Crow]]'' {{Tie In Novel}}s, being preceded by ''The Crow: Quoth the Crow'' and proceeded by ''The Crow: Clash by Night.''

A serial killer, dubbed The Bourbon Street Ripper, is preying on crossdressers, drag queens, and UsefulNotes/{{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 HeteronormativeCrusader named Jordan who is convinced that all "gender transgressors" are secretly AliensAmongUs.

The book is often cited as being the inspiration for the third ''Crow'' film, ''[[Film/TheCrowSalvation 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 ''Literature/TheCrowWickedPrayer'', who is listed in the credits of the film version of ''[[Film/TheCrowWickedPrayer Wicked Prayer]]'').

! Tropes:

* AbandonedArea: The climax takes place in an abandoned factory.
* AgentScully: 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.
* AffirmativeActionLegacy: Jared is the first gay Crow, while Lucrece is the first (and so far only) transgender Crow.
* TheAlcoholic: Detective Gray, due to a combination of being an ArmoredClosetGay and PTSD and guilt over the incident that crippled his ex-partner, Linda Getty.
* AliensAmongUs: 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 AlienInvasion. He is also crazy, in case that is not obvious.
* AlwaysNight: Either that, or it is so overcast and rainy that it might as well be night.
* AmbiguousDisorder: Jordan's mental illness is never identified by name, but it shows all of the hallmarks of paranoid schizophrenia.
* AmoralAttorney: The District Attorney is a bigot who once backed David Duke.
* AngryCollarGrab: Lucrece uses her new, crow-bestowed superhuman strength to do this to Jordan.
* ApologeticAttacker: 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."
* ArmoredClosetGay: 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 "[[BecomingTheMask there would be only the mask, no vestige left of the man hiding underneath]]."
* ArtisticLicenseGunSafety: Detective Unger leaves his holster just hanging from a coat hook with a fully-loaded gun in it.
* AttackTheMouth: Jared shoots Detective Unger in the mouth.
* BadassBystander: 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?"
* BadCopIncompetentCop: 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 Teammate}}s.
* BatterUp: Benny and Lucrece were once saved from a pair of bullies by a baseball bat-wielding Great Aunt Isolde.
* BattleInTheRain: The finale takes placing during a raging hurricane.
* BazaarOfTheBizarre: 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.
* BigBadEnsemble: Jordan is the main villain, but Jared also has grudges against Detective Unger and John Henry Harrod.
* TheBigEasy: The book is set in New Orleans, which is portrayed as a ViceCity.
* BigGood: The ancient crow that Lucrece sees in the DarkWorld, "a crow so black, so impossibly enormous that he might have been the very first, the incarnation of age clothed in ragged black feathers."
* BigotWithABadge: [[UpToEleven All of them]], except for Detective Gray, his ex-partner, Linda Getty, and maybe his new partner, Detective Thibodeaux.
* BitchInSheepsClothing: 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 MirandaRights. 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?"
* BlackAndWhiteInsanity: 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.
* BlackmailBackfire: A young prostitute threatens to out Detective Gray while mugging him, which prompts Gray to fly into an UnstoppableRage and give the boy a NoHoldsBarredBeatdown.
* BloodIsSquickerInWater: Jordan dumps Michele's remains in a fountain in Audubon Park.
* BodyHorror:
** 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 HealingFactor.
** 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 ScreamsLikeALittleGirl.
* BookEnds: 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 GoIntoTheLight.
* BoomHeadshot: One of Jordan's victims, Roy, and Detective Gray are all killed by gunshots to the head, with Roy being subject to a DoubleTap. 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.
* CameraFiend: Jared was a photographer, taking pictures of things like weddings and baby showers to pay the rent, and gothic architecture (mostly in cemeteries) and people for his art.
* CareerEndingInjury: Detective Gray's ex-partner, Linda Getty, left the force after sustaining a serious wound to the thigh courtesy of a crackhead named Roy.
* CarvedMark: 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 other crows to return her to life to save Jared from Jordan.
* CastFullOfGay: Most of the characters are gay, including the new Crow.
* CelebrityResemblance: Lucrece compares Aaron Marsh to "a slightly deranged Creator/WaltWhitman."
* ChainedToABed: 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.
* ChildhoodBrainDamage: 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 a grand mal seizure 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 MagicalNegro 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).
* CigaretteOfAnxiety: The stress of his job, and especially the Benny crime scene, has made a chain smoker out of Detective Unger.
* ConspiracyTheorist: 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 and Area 51.
* CopKiller: Jared kills one of his arresting officers, Detective Unger, while Jared kills Detective Gray.
* TheCoroner: Pam Tierney, an Irishwoman and a ButchLesbian. The police hate her and she hates the police, seeing them as little more than a NecessarilyEvil.
* CourtroomAntic: A brawl breaks out during Jared's trial, sparked by volleying insults between Lucrece and John Henry Harrod.
* CrashInThroughTheCeiling: 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.
* CreepyCemetery: Lafayette Cemetery, the old graveyard where the crow resurrects Jared.
* CreepyJazzMusic: The serial killer only listens to jazz because it is "the only music he's relatively certain is free of Their influence."
* CreepyTwins: Benny and Lucrece are nice people, but they sometimes play this up, like during their first photo shoot with Jared.
* CriminalMindGames:
** Jordan leaves passages taken from ''The Raven'' at the Benny and Michele crime scenes, as a threat to his 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.
* CuriousQualmsOfConscience: 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.
* DarkWorld: The Land of the Crow, a dour and eternally misty realm that appears to consist of nothing but TheLostWoods.
* DefectiveDetective: Detective Gray is an ArmoredClosetGay and TheAlcoholic who probably also has PTSD.
* DestinationDefenestration: A crackhead throws a baby through a window and onto the street, where it is run over by a car.
* DeusExMachina: 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.
* DisposableSexWorker: The vast majority of Jordan's victims are sex workers, with his first known victim being a crossdressing hustler named Josie.
* DisposableVagrant: A lot of the victims are also homeless, like Michele.
* DramaticDrop: Jared dropped his groceries when he found Benny dead.
* DressedAllInRubber: A lot of characters (including the main one) wear a lot of latex, leather, and PVC. Jared even ends up trading his MonsterClown mask in for a bondage hood after killing Detective Unger and John Henry Harrod.
* DrivenToSuicide:
** 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 SelfHarm.
* EarnYourHappyEnding: 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.
* EeriePaleSkinnedBrunette: Benny and Lucrece are chalk white with hair like black satin, at least according to Jared.
* EvenEvilHasStandards:
** Jordan finds the concept of {{Creepy Souvenir}}s 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 ForScience (he thinks that they are aliens or people who have been implanted with viruses and NanoMachines). 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 ThouShaltNotKillMuggles (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.
* ExcrementStatement: Linda Getty's bigoted fellow officers taunted her by leaving used tampons taped to her locker, which they also defaced with the word "Dyke."
* ExplosiveInstrumentation: 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.
* EyeScream: Michele has her eyelids removed by Jordan.
* FakingTheDead: 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.
* FantasticFragility: 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.
* FingerInTheMail: Jordan leaves a finger in a note for Detective Gray, to show Gray that he is serious.
* FlashbackBPlot: The main plot, which opens with Jared returning to life, is frequently interrupted by flashbacks (by multiple characters) to the events leading up to Jared's death.
* ForkFencing: Jared was stabbed to death with a spoon that was sharpened into a shiv.
* FrameUp:
** 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.
* FreakOut: 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.
* FreudianExcuse: Jordan suffered ChildhoodBrainDamage 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 MagicalNegro 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.
* GoIntoTheLight: 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.
* GoodCopBadCop: 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."
* TheGreatestStoryNeverTold: This is how Jordan views his crusade against the nonexistent AlienInvasion.
--> 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.
* GroinAttack: Jared, during his post-resurrection FreakOut, is kneed in the crotch by Lucrece.
* GrumpyOldMan: Aaron Marsh, the self-admittedly "selfish" ornithologist who Lucrece consults about the resurrected Jared.
* GuttedLikeAFish: Jordan disembowels Lucrece, whose remains are later found (on display) by Detective Gray.
* HalfTheManHeUsedToBe: A crackhead literally shoots a woman in half with a high-powered shotgun during a gun battle with Detective Gray.
* HasAType: Jared had a thing for "well-muscled submissives" until he met Benny.
* HeteronormativeCrusader: Jordan and John Henry Harrod, the former due to madness, and the latter due to being a glorified Neo-Nazi.
* HowWeGotHere: As Jared returns to life, we get flashbacks of his death, his sentencing, his arrest, and him finding what is left of Benny.
* IcyGrayEyes: Jordan and John Henry Harrod, with the former being a mix of this and IcyBlueEyes.
* IfYouKillHimYouWillBeJustLikeHim: 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."
* IHaveManyNames: 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.
* IJustWantToBeNormal: 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."
* IllKillYou: Fed up with John Henry Harrod badgering Lucrece, Jared lunges for him while screaming that he will kill him in a definite instance of NotHelpingYourCase.
* ImHavingSoulPains: The crow experiences intense pain as it resurrects Jared.
* InsaneTrollLogic: 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."
* InsaneEqualsViolent: 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.
* InsanityImmunity: 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.
* InstantSedation: Michele immediately goes down after being injected with something by Jordan.
* InsultBackfire: 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."
* ItIsDehumanizing: Jordan, convinced that his victims are not human or no longer are, refers to them exclusively with terms like "it" and "They" and "Them."
* JoggersFindDeath: Michele's corpse was discovered by a man walking his Chihuahua.
* KickTheMoralityPet: In a fit of anger, Jared starts dead-naming Lucrece, repeatedly calling her Lucas.
* KidsAreCruel: Benny and Lucrece were bullied throughout their childhood, due to being raised in isolation by their spinster hermit aunt, Isolde.
* LargeAndInCharge: The lead crow is the size of a vulture.
* LightningReveal: This occurs right before Detective Unger is attacked by Jared.
* LonelyFuneral: The priest aside, no one attended Great Aunt Isolde's funeral besides Benny and Lucrece. Benny and Jared's funerals were similarly empty.
* LudicrousGibs: Jared's crow gets shot to bits by Jordan.
* MadnessMantra: 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..."
* MagicalNegro: 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.
* MaskOfSanity: 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.
* MaybeMagicMaybeMundane: It is implied that there may have been something otherworldly, [[DemonicPossession 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 MagicalNegro 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."
--> 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.
* TheMentallyDisturbed: 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 NanoMachines 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.
* MonsterClown: Jared wears a stark white Mardi Gras harlequin mask while killing Detective Unger and John Henry Harrod.
* MyCarHatesMe: 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.
* NeverFoundTheBody: 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.
* NoHoldsBarredBeatdown: 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?"
* NoNameGiven: The man who killed Jared is just called the Cuban.
* NoodleImplements: Jordan's tools include ones that he could not buy anywhere and had to make himself "because no one's ever needed them before."
* NothingPersonal: 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.
* ObliviouslyEvil: Jordan's victims are all innocent people, but in his psychotic, [[ChildhoodBrainDamage 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 Area 51 or "[[NebulousEvilOrganization The Cabal]]" or "The Invasion" (which he dreams involves an "[[TheVirus 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 NanoMachines, though he is able to get over it by reassuring himself that Gray being a homosexual meant that he was like or involved with "[[AliensAmongUs 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, [[WeAreEverywhere who is everywhere]]) as draftees in a secret "army of light and blood" who are diligently working from the shadows to thwart an AlienInvasion.
--> '''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?
* OldDarkHouse: Benny and Lucrece were raised in a "rambling derelict" of a mansion that predated the Civil War.
* ParentalAbandonment: Benny and Lucrece's mother ran off to Pensacola with a travelling evangelist, and left them with their Great Aunt Isolde.
* PistolWhipping: This is how Jared breaks Detective Unger's nose.
* PokeInTheThirdEye: Attempting to enter Jordan's mind causes Lucrece to have a violent seizure and hallucinations due to Jordan's InsanityImmunity.
* PoliceAreUseless: They are almost all bigots who cause more problems than they solve, and even the main one ends up dying having accomplished absolutely nothing.
* PoliticallyIncorrectVillain: The villains are all racist, sexist, homophobic, transphobic, or some combination thereof.
* PornStash: 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.
* PostHumousCharacter: Benny only appears in flashbacks, having been killed before the events of the story by Jordan.
* PsychicLink: Lucrece is able to see and communicate with Jared through his crow, thanks to her crow scar and one of the crow's feathers.
* PsychicNosebleed: 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."
* PunkInTheTrunk: Jordan stuffs Michele's remains into his trunk, and then dumps them in Audubon Park.
* RaceFetish: John Henry Harrod cheats on his wife exclusively with Latina and African-American women.
* RapeDiscretionShot: Jordan raping the unconscious Lucrece occurs "off-page."
* RapeIsASpecialKindOfEvil: Jordan responds to Lucrece's attempt to enter his mind by physically 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 MindRape.
* RainOfBlood: Benny's remains were discovered when his blood started seeping through the floor and through the ceiling of Mrs. Poche's apartment.
* RaisedByGrandparents: Benny and Lucrece were raised by their Grant Aunt Isolde.
* ReluctantPsycho: Michele overhears Jordan whisper "Forgive me" as she is being killed by Jordan, who admits that he sometimes experiences {{Villainous BSOD}}s 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.
* RiddleForTheAges: 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.
* RiseFromYourGrave: Jared was resurrected five days after his death, so he wakes up in a coffin in a mausoleum in Lafayette Cemetery.
* RoomFullOfCrazy: A windowless room in Jordan's house is full of nothing but notebooks that contain all of Jordan's deranged writings.
* RuleOfThree: The crow pecks exactly three times on Jared's mausoleum to resurrect Jared.
* ScreamsLikeALittleGirl: John Henry Harrod, right before he gets killed by Jared.
* SerialKiller:
** 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.
* ShrineToTheFallen: 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.
* ShootTheShaggyDog: Detective Gray, despite getting multiple chapters focused on him, accomplishes absolutely nothing before being anticlimactically killed by Jordan.
* SlashedThroat: 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.
* SpitefulSpit: Lucrece spits on John Henry Harrod during Jared's trail, and calls him a "sick, hateful son of a bitch."
* SpitTrailKiss: One of these forms when Benny kisses Lucrece in front of Jared.
* SplitPersonality: 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.
* StevenUlyssesPerhero: The new Crow is named Jared [[Literature/TheRaven Poe]].
* StraightEdgeEvil: John Henry Herrod wears a condom while sodomizing a prostitute, so he believes in safe sex, [[StrawHypocrite if nothing else]].
* StrappedToAnOperatingTable: The unfortunate fate of the victims who get taken home by Jordan.
* StrawHypocrite: 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.
* SuperLoser: 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.
* SuperWindowJump: Jared jumps through a lot of windows during his RoaringRampageOfRevenge.
* TattooedCrook: The convict who murdered Jared had a .35 Magnum tattooed on one arm, and the Virgin Mary tattooed on the other.
* TeacherStudentRomance: 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.
* TeethFlying: Lucrece smacks Jordan so hard that his front teeth "snap off at the gum line."
* ThatManIsDead:
--> '''Detective Gray:''' This doesn't even make sense, Lethe.\\
'''Jordan:''' I'm Jordan now.
* ThisCannotBe: Jordan loses it when he realizes that the Crow is Jared, who is supposed to have died in Angola State Prison.
* ThouShaltNotKillMuggles: 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 "[[AliensAmongUs Them]]." After briefly mulling it over, Jordan reassures himself that Gray's homosexuality meant that he was like "Them."
* ThroughTheEyesOfMadness: 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 NanoMachines that are designed to teleport away or self-destruct to avoid detection.
* TitleDrop: We get two references to the newly-undead Jared's "Lazarus heart."
* TongueTrauma: Jordan is introduced having cut the tongue out of a victim named Marjory Marie West.
* TheToothHurts: Detective Unger's teeth are chipped and broken when his own gun is jammed into his mouth by Jared.
* TorturePorn: Downplayed. The book is full of torture, but it is not really all that prominent, with the emphasis being more on the [[{{Gorn}} gory]] aftermath.
* TortureTechnician: Jordan tortures his victims in an attempt to get them to divulge information about the AlienInvasion, 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.
* TropicalEpilogue: 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."
* TrueArtIsIncomprehensible: In-universe, 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 ThreeWaySex. 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.
* TwoferTokenMinority: Detective Gray's ex-partner, Linda Getty, was gay and African-American.
* UndignifiedDeath: Jared and Lucrece throw Jordan to the floor and stomp on him until he dies.
* UsedToBeASweetKid: 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.
* ViceCity: New Orleans is overrun with corruption, violence, crime, bigotry, and urban decay, and portrayed as an all-around Hellhole.
* VillainousCheekbones: John Henry Harrod is a bigot whose face "is narrow, pinched, with hollow, hungry cheeks."
* VomitingCop:
** 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 GreenAroundTheGills.
** Detective Thibodeaux vomits at the sight of Michele's body, while Detective Gray just gets GreenAroundTheGills.
* WalkingTechbane: Being struck by lightning when he was 8 messed with Jordan's body chemistry, making it so that he cannot use watches or compasses.
* WellIntentionedExtremist: 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.
* WhiteMaskOfDoom: Jared wears a stark white Mardi Gras harlequin mask while killing Detective Unger and John Henry Harrod.
* WickedStepmother: One of Jordan's victims ran away from home because she was being abused, physically and sexually, by her stepfather, usually while the man drunkenly shouted things like, "It ain't no different than the way the world's gonna treat you. It ain't no different than the goddamn world."
* WouldHurtAChild:
** 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.
* WrongGenreSavvy: 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 [[Film/TheyLive John Nada]] or the Literature/{{Animorphs}}) when in reality he is just an insane serial killer who is murdering random LGBT people (crime or horror thriller villain).
* YouKilledMyFather: Jared was murdered in prison by the brother of a man who was killed by the real Bourbon Street Ripper.
* YouNeedABreathMint: Jordan's breath is described as smelling terrible, like "rotten vegetables and wintergreen mints."
* YouWouldntBelieveMeIfIToldYou: When Detective Gray asks Jared how Jared and his crow got into the police station washroom, Jared just shrugs and says, "ItsALongStory, and believe me, you wouldn't buy it if I did tell you."
* YourHeadASplode: John Henry Harrod's head is completely annihilated by a shotgun blast to the face, courtesy of Jared.
----
* AlternateCharacterInterpretation: As noted on the main page under MaybeMagicMaybeMundane, the narrative sometimes gives the impression that Jordan is not just insane, but the victim of some kind of DemonicPossession.
* {{Anvilicious}}: Only three police officers (two of whom are homosexuals themselves) are not gay-bashing bigots, but to really drive home how unfairly the law can treat LGBT people, the book has the District Attorney be a glorified Neo-Nazi and open supporter of David Duke. The later reveal that this character regularly cheats on his wife (despite his professed Christian values) with non-white hookers potentially pushes things into {{Narm}}.
* CommonKnowledge: Anyone who has actually read the book will quickly realize that it has nothing in common with its alleged film adaptation, ''Film/TheCrowSalvation'' (which does not even list the book's author anywhere in its credits, unlike [[Film/TheCrowWickedPrayer the film adaptation]] of ''Literature/TheCrowWickedPrayer'').
* HarsherInHindsight: New Orleans being devastated by Hurricane Michael, which floods everything and leaves bodies floating everywhere, uncomfortably prefigures the real-life New Orleans being devastated just a few years later by Hurricane Katrina.
* NarmCharm: A man killing trans people because he thinks that they are aliens due to his brain being fried by lightning when he was boy sounds kind of... stupid, but Creator/BillyMartin manages to pull it off and create an incredibly unsettling character in the form of The Bourbon Street Ripper.
* TrappedByMountainLions: Detective Gray's subplot has absolutely no bearing on the main one up until the very end, when Jordan (who somehow knows that Gray is gay) just up and decides to target Gray, who Jared starts following in order to find Jordan, which ended up not even being necessary due the psychic distress signal that Lucrece was able to send to Jared.
----
* CowboyBebopAtHisComputer: The whole "''The Lazarus Heart'' inspired ''Salvation''" misconception presumably stems from someone merely reading plot summaries of the two stories, noticing their vague similarities, and then adding their synthesis to websites like Wikipedia.
* WorkingTitle: ''Framed in Blood.''

* NeverFoundTheBody: Jordan and Detective Gray's corpses are found, but not Jared or Lucrece's bodies, the two having entered the afterlife after reuniting with Benny's spirit at Lafayette Cemetery.

* ExcrementStatement: Linda Getty's bigoted fellow officers taunted her by leaving used tampons taped to her locked, which they also defaced with the word "Dyke."

* ReluctantPsycho: Michele overhears Jordan whisper "Forgive me" as she is being killed by Jordan, who admits that he sometimes experiences {{Villainous BSOD}}s 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 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 [[InsaneTrollLogic 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.

* TrueArtIsIncomprehensible: In-universe, Jared met Benny and Lucrece at a performing arts show which consisted entirely of a man in an old alligator hide and expensive-looking loafers reading aloud from ''The Wall Street Journal.''

* YourHeadASplode: John Henry Harrod's head is completely annihilated by a shotgun blast to the face, courtesy of Jared.

A serial killer, dubbed The Bourbon Street Ripper, is preying upon crossdressers, drag queens, and UsefulNotes/{{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.

* DefectiveDetective: Detective Gray is an ArmoredClosetGay and TheAlcholic who also probably has PTSD.

* DressedAllInRubber: A lot of characters (including the main one) wear a lot of latex, leather, and PVC.

** Jordan finds the concept of {{Creepy Souvenir}}s 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 ForScience (he thinks that they are aliens or people who have been implanted with viruses and nanoMachines). 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 ThouShaltNotKillMuggles (he does, after all, think that he is fighting alien invaders on humanity's behalf).

* CareerEndingInjury: Detective Gray's ex-partner Linda Getty left the force after sustaining a serious wound to the thigh courtesy of a crackhead named Roy.
* CarvedMark: 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 allows Lucrece to somehow understand and communicate through Jared's crow, and gives her the power to force the other crows to return her to life to save Jared from Jordan.

* EarnYourHappyEnding: After everything, 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.

** Jordan finds the concept of {{Creepy Souvenir}}s 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 ForScience (he thinks that they are aliens or people who They have implanted with viruses and nanites). 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 ThouShaltNotKillMuggles (he does, after all, think that he is fighting alien invaders on humanity's behalf).

* LonelyFuneral: The priest aside, no one attended Great Aunt Isolde's funeral besides Benny and Lucrece.

* RapeIsASpecialKindOfEvil: Jordan responds to Lucrece's attempt to enter his mind by physically raping her, something which he admits he has never done or even felt the urge to before, but must now, as retaliation for the attempted MindRape.

* SuperLoser: 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 [[DeusExMachina come back to life]] to save Jared and stop Jordan.

* TwoferTokenMinority: Detective Gray's ex-partner Linda Getty was gay and African-American.

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 HeteronormativeCrusader named Jordan who is convinced that all "gender transgressors" are secretly AliensAmongUs planning an AlienInvasion.

* BadCopIncompetentCop: 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 Teammate}}s.

* BodyHorror: 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 HealingFactor.

* ExcrementStatement: Linda Getty's bigoted fellow officers taunt her by leaving used tampons taped to her locked, which they also defaced with the word "Dyke."

* WellIntentionedExtremist: 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 (and others like him who he assumes are out there) is doing as wrong because, in his eyes, what he is doing is warring against literally inhuman and otherworldly forces on Earth's behalf.

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 HeteronormativeCrusader named Jordan who is convinced that all "gender transgressors" are secretly AliensAmongUs.

* TheAlcoholic: Detective Gray, due to a combination of being an ArmoredClosetGay, and PTSD and guilt over the incident that crippled his ex-partner, Linda Getty.

* BrotherSisterIncest: Benny and Lucrece kiss intimately, and Lucrece watches Benny have sex with Jared after Jared turns down their implied offer of ThreeWaySex. 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.

* DestinationDefenestration: A baby is thrown through a window and onto the street, where it is run over by a car.

* DressedAllInRubber: A lot of characters (including the main one) wear a lot of latex, leather, PVC, etc.

** Jordan finds the concept of {{Creepy Souvenir}}s to be tawdry and tasteless, and makes it clear that he only preserves and keeps pieces of his victims (who he thinks are aliens) so that he can study them ForScience.

* ObliviouslyEvil: 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 Area 51 or "[[NebulousEvilOrganization The Cabal]]" or "The Invasion" (which he dreams involves an "[[TheVirus 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 NanoMachines, though he is able to get over it by reassuring himself that Gray being a homosexual meant that he was like or involved with "[[AliensAmongUs 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 sees himself and others like him (who he is convinced exist, yet does not seek out for fear of exposing himself to the enemy, [[WeAreEverywhere who is everywhere]]) as draftees in a secret "army of light and blood" who are diligently working from the shadows to thwart an AlienInvasion.

* StevenUlyssesPerhero: The new Crow is named Jared Poe.

* TropicalEpilogue: 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" in 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."
* TrueArtIsIncomprehensible: Jared met Benny and Lucrece at a performing arts show which consisted entirely of a man in an old alligator hide and expensive-looking loafers reading aloud from ''The Wall Street Journal.''

* WrongGenreSavvy: 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 [[Film/TheyLive John Nada]]) when in reality he is just an insane serial killer who is murdering random LGBT people (crime or horror thriller villain).

The book is often cited as being the inspiration for the third ''Crow'' film, ''[[Film/TheCrowSalvation Salvation]]'', even though the two stories have next to nothing in common and Poppy Z. Brite is not listed anywhere in the credits of ''Salvation'' (unlike Norman Partridge, the author of ''Literature/TheCrowWickedPrayer'', who is listed in the credits of the film version of ''[[Film/TheCrowWickedPrayer Wicked Prayer]]'').

* ButchLesbian: The coroner, a heavyset third-generation Irishwoman named Pam Tierney.

* CareerEndingInjury: Detective Gray's ex-partner Linda Getty left the force after sustaining a serious wound to the thigh courtesy of crackhead named Roy.
* CarvedMark: 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 allows Lucrece to somehow understand and communicate through Jared's crow.

* ChildhoodBrainDamage: 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 (in "exchange" for his name, which he still struggles with in the present) when in reality all it appears to have done is given him brain damage (just touching his mind notably gives Lucrece a grand mal seizure 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 MagicalNegro 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).

** Detective Norris, unable to get over the horror of the Benny crime scene, committed suicide by slitting his own throat with a broken piece of mirror.

* EyeScream: Michele has his eyelids removed by Jordan.

** Near the end, he 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.

* FreudianExcuse: Jordan suffered ChildhoodBrainDamage 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 MagicalNegro 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).

* IHaveManyNames: Jordan has been dubbed The Bourbon Street Ripper by the media, and also goes by various other names, like Joseph Lethe and Stanley Hudson.

* IllKillYou: Fed up with John Henry Harrod badgering Lucrece, Jared lunges for him while screaming that he will him in a definite instance of NotHelpingYourCase.

* MagicalNegro: Growing up, Jordan knew one named Julianna. She told 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.

* ObliviouslyEvil: 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 designed to disintegrate or teleport away to avoid discovery) and inability to get his victims to talk (no matter what he does to them) about Area 51 or "[[NebulousEvilOrganization The Cabal]]" or "The Invasion" (which he dreams involves an "[[TheVirus 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 NanoMachines, though he is able to get over it by reassuring himself that Gray being a homosexual meant that he was like or involved with "[[AliensAmongUs 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 sees himself and others like him (who he is convinced exist, yet does not seek out for fear of exposing himself to the enemy, [[WeAreEverywhere who is everywhere]]) as draftees in a secret "army of light and blood" who are diligently working from the shadows to thwart an AlienInvasion.

* SlashedThroat: Detective Norris, traumatized by the Benny crime scene and needled by the crows, committed suicide by slitting his own throat with a broken piece of mirror.

* TropicalEpilogue: The epilogue reveals that Aaron Marsh used the insurance money gained from his shop's destruction during Hurricane Michael to retire to Amsterdam.

* BoomHeadshot: A flashback shows Jordan shooting a victim in the head before dumping their body in Audubon Park, while another has Detective Gray give a cranial DoubleTap to a crackhead named Roy. Jared is on the receiving end of one of these (not that it matters, him being a Crow and all) during his confrontation with John Henry Harrod.

* CopKiller: Jared kills one of his arresting officers, Detective Unger.

* FakingTheDead: 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.
* FingerInTheMail: Jordan leaves a finger in a note for Detective Gray, to show Gray that he is serious.
* ForkFencing: Jared was stabbed to death with a spoon that was sharpened into a shiv.
* FrameUp:
** 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, he kills Detective Gray and frames him for the post-Benny deaths, including the murder of Lucrece.
* FreakOut: 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.
* FreudianExcuse: Jordan suffered ChildhoodBrainDamage 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 MagicalNegro 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).

* RiddlefortheAges: How ''did'' Jared and his crow sneak in and out of the police station washroom to confront Detective Gray?

--> '''Detective Gray:''' This doesn't even make sense, Leth.\\

! Tropes:

TBA

''The Crow: Wicked Prayer'' is a 2000 novel written by Norman Partridge. It is the fifth and penultimate instalment in a series of six ''[[Franchise/TheCrow Crow]]'' {{Tie In Novel}}s, being preceded by ''The Crow: Temple of Night'' and proceeded by ''The Crow: Hellbound.''

An ex-drifter named Dan Cody is on his way to propose to his girlfriend Leticia Dreams the Truth Hardin, a half-Crow Native who runs a small UsefulNotes/{{Arizona}} tourist trap called the Spirit Song Trading Post. Unfortunately for Dan, a pair of goth occultists named Johnny Church and Kyra Damon have beaten him to Leticia, whose unusual blue eyes they need for their quest to steal the mythical powers of the crows. After killing Dan and Leticia, the evil duo take Leticia's eyes, seal her and her boyfriend's bodies in an old refrigerator, and resume their journey, guided by Kyra's grimoire and a sassy ShrunkenHead named Raymondo.

A single crow fights its way through the magical defenses that Kyra had placed around the corpses of the murdered lovers, and resurrects Dan as the new Crow, so that he can not only avenge his and Leticia's deaths, but also put a stop to Kyra's plans, which not only endanger the crow and its brethren, but also the very souls of every prior unjustly murdered mortal who the crows had revived as a Crow.

The book was ''very'' loosely adapted into a 2005 DirectToVideo film written and directed by Lance Mungia, co-written by Jeff Most and Sean Hood, and starring Creator/TaraReid, Creator/DavidBoreanaz, Creator/EdwardFurlong, and Creator/EmmanuelleChriqui.

!! Tropes

* AbusiveParents: Kyra's father beat her, once hitting her so hard that she was PunchedAcrossTheRoom.
* ActuallyPrettyFunny:
** As Johnny is stuffing Dan and Leticia's bodies into an old refrigerator, Raymondo remarks, "Just goes to show my mother was right. It's dangerous to play in old refrigerators." Despite how lame the joke is, Johnny still laughs at it.
** Doctor Carlisle gives Dan a six-shooter that allegedly belonged to Jesse James, and notes that it may bring Dan luck. When Dan points out that Jesse James died from being shot in the back, Carlisle responds with, "So did you, Dan." After a long, awkward pause, the two laugh.
** Johnny screws with Father Cooke by holding him at gunpoint and asking him if he worships Satan. In a panic, Father Cooke blurts out, "I'm nonsectarian!" Johnny is amused, clapping the minister on the shoulder while laughing, "Good answer, preach."
* TheAllegedCar: Dan's Jeep is old and battered, with a busted headlight, a twisted bumper, and "345,000 miles on the odometer." The Chevy Apache pickup truck that he briefly replaces it with after becoming the new Crow is not much better, not that it matters, as things like a working tape deck or air conditioning "weren't important to an ambulating dead man, anyway."
* AllWomenAreDomsAllMenAreSubs: Johnny is largely subservient to Kyra, who he even calls "Mistress." He secretly resents this, though, and longs to be equal or superior to her, and when he falsely believes that he has gained Crow power, he tries (and fails) to rape Kyra, to show her that they are now on even footing and that she is no longer his glorified {{Dominatrix}}.
* AndIMustScream: After Dan hangs her, Kyra wakes up in the Land of the Crow, hanging from a tree and surrounded by angry crows who are preparing to attack her, the implication being that she will savaged by them for all eternity as punishment for her crimes against them.
* ArmorPiercingQuestion: When a grief-filled Dan angrily yells that the crow should have resurrected Leticia instead of him, the crow snaps back, "Really, Dan Cody? Would you really want Leticia to feel what you're feeling now?"
* AssholeVictim: The gang who coerced Kyra and other desperate girls into doing Satanism-themed pornographic films under the pretense of performing SexMagic. After stealing the group's grimoire, Kyra burned their house down, killing all twelve of the Satanists, as well as the latest girl who they were with (not that Kyra cared about that).
* AttemptedRape: Johnny tries ([[BullyingADragon emphasis on that]]) to rape Kyra after they get married, invoking MaritalRapeLicense.
* BadassBoast: During his fight with Dan, Johnny goes a bit nuts, shrieking, "My name's Johnny Church! I'm half crocodile and half shark, with a little Rottweiler tossed in! And I'm here to put you six feet south of my boots, cowboy! I was raised in Hell and suckled the tit of Satan's bride, and I eat hellfire and shit brimstone! I've kicked men to death with my cloven hooves, and I've got a barbed red tail and I don't give a shit where I drag it! I've swum seas of broken glass! I've climbed razor-blade mountains! I've walked thirty-seven miles of barbed wire, Dannyboy... I've worn a cobra snake for a necktie! Trick or treat! I'm gonna carve you like a Halloween pumpkin! I'm gonna carve you up, Dannyboy! I'm gonna eat your brains for breakfast!"
* BadPeopleAbuseAnimals: Kyra rips out a cat's throat with her bare teeth as part of one of her spells, while Johnny (whose encounter with the crow has left him antsy about birds) later shoots the doves at The Little Chapel of the Stars.
* BaitTheDog: Kyra is initially shown treating Raymondo better than Johnny, but then she encourages Johnny to abuse Raymondo by sticking him on their Mercury's antenna.
* TheBartender: Dan was working as one of these when he met Doctor Carlisle, who gave him a new job collecting specimens for her in the Arizona wilderness.
* BathtubScene: Kyra gets one of these, in a skull-shaped tub, shortly after she and Johnny arrive in Las Vegas.
* BattleInTheRain: Dan and Kyra's showdown takes place during a storm, which is fortuitous, as Dan is able to use the rainwater to weaken Kyra by washing off the eldritch symbols that she had painted on her body.
* BigBad: Kyra, who is assisted in her endeavors by her boyfriend, Johnny, and their sidekick, Raymondo.
* BleachedUnderpants: Lilith Spain's S&M-themed vampire films include both the regular versions, and the bootleg hardcore ones.
* BloodbathVillainOrigin: After stealing her grimoire from a group of faux Satanists, Kyra set the gang's house on fire, killing all twelve of the Satanists, as well as an innocent girl (not that she cared about that).
* BloodSplatteredWarrior: Immediately after his resurrection, Dan takes on a magically-enthralled army of crows, all of which he slaughters, leaving him drenched in their blood and gore.
* BodyHorror: As Kyra steals more and more Crow power, Dan loses his strength, ability to understand the crow, and HealingFactor, but not his inability to feel pain or immortality. By the end of the book, he has accumulated so many injuries that he looks like little more than a shambling, humanoid wound.
* BodyInABreadbox: Raymondo has Johnny lock Dan and Leticia's bodies in an old Westinghouse refrigerator.
* BodyPaint: Kyra uses the cremains of a dead Crow to paint her naked body with eldritch symbols, allowing her to steal even more Crow power. Dan hugs her to imprint some of the symbols on himself, giving him a second wind in his battle with Kyra.
* ButtMonkey: Raymondo. He died a horrible death, and is now stuck as a ShrunkenHead, subject to indignities like having his favorite [=CDs=] pawned, being left alone in a hot car with all of the windows rolled up, and being tied to that car's antenna as it speeds down the highway, splattering him with bugs.
* ByTheHair: Dan rips out a handful of Kyra's hair during their fight atop the columbarium.
* CannibalClan: Raymondo ran afoul of one of these while leading missionaries through the Amazon in 1919. They killed him, and then gave what was left of him to their medicine man, who proceeded to turn Raymondo into a ShrunkenHead.
* CannibalismSuperpower: Kyra magically replaces her own eyes with Leticia's by cutting out and eating them.
* CardCarryingVillain: Johnny revels in being an outlaw, and at one point gives a speech about how he is TheUnfettered.
* CelebrityResemblance: Doctor Carlisle is said to resemble Creator/BarbaraStanwyck circa ''Series/TheBigValley.''
* ChainedByFashion: Kyra's necklace is a small chrome chain, which she uses to hide the scar left by her InterruptedSuicide.
* ChainPain: Dan fends off Kyra's crows with a whirling chain.
* ChaseScene: Between the crow and Johnny's 1949 Mercury.
* CloudCuckooLander: Lilith Spain comes off as dippy even when not high on drugs, which only exacerbate her loopyness.
* ContinuityNod: The crow presents Dan with an old Halloween makeup kit that contains black and white face paint, obviously wanting Dan to don the iconic Crow makeup pattern popularized by Eric Draven. Dan does not, even after the crow shows him images of previous Crows, possibly including Eric.
* ConvenientlyAnOrphan: Both of Dan's parents died of alcoholism-related problems when he was young, leaving him to be shunted from one group and foster home to another until he finally just ran away when he turned 16.
* CoolAndUnusualPunishment: After Johnny pisses her off by trying to rape her, Kyra punishes him by forcing him to watch as she wails on Johnny's car with Johnny's own belt buckle.
* CoolCar: Johnny drives a Satanically-enhanced 1949 Mercury, which he stole from a businessman (after punching him in the face) in Dallas.
* CreepyCemetery: The villains eat barbecue and have sex in one, and the finale takes place in another one near Hearse Manor.
* CreepySouvenir: After killing Dan and Leticia, Johnny and Kyra take Dan's wedding ring and leather jacket, as well as one of Leticia's scorpion paperweights, as mementos.
* CutPhoneLines: Before laying siege to Erik Hearse's mansion, Johnny sabotages its telephone and alarm systems.
* DangerousWindows: Dan punches through a large window, showering Kyra with glass shards that are blown at her by stormy winds, right before the crow crashes through another window to attack her and help Dan.
* DarkActionGirl: Kyra, after she steals a bunch of Crow power.
* DarknessVonGothickName: Erik Hearse, Johnny Church, Kyra Damon, and Lilith Spain.
* DarkWorld: The Land of the Crow, which is basically an eternally gloomy, heavily forested, and endless CreepyCemetery.
* DeadpanSnarker: Raymondo. Being a ShrunkenHead, he is unable to really do much other than sass, which he does a lot, usually at Johnny's expense.
* DeathOfAChild: One of the highway's landmarks is a memorial dedicated to an unnamed fifth-grade girl who was run over by a drunk, sleeping driver. Dan is a bit haunted by it, even though he had only ever stopped at it once, frequently wondering if the girl had time to react to the oncoming car, or if she died completely unaware.
* DepletedPhlebotinumShells: Kyra soaks bullets in Raymondo's black magic-infused tears, to make them extra damaging against the crow and Dan.
* DefiantToTheEnd: After being gutted by Dan, Johnny dies FlippingTheBird.
* DisproportionateRetribution: Feeling that a saleswoman was rude and condescending towards her, Kyra cuts the woman's tongue out, and would have killed her were it not for PragmaticVillainy.
* DissonantSerenity: As Johnny and Kyra are laying siege to her mansion, Lilith Spain shoots up on drugs, leaving her too blissed out to care when Johnny and Kyra (who Lilith deludedly believes to be her own ghost) barge into her room and begin demanding answers about the powers of the crows.
* DontMakeMeTakeMyBeltOff: Johnny tries to attack Kyra with his belt, but she takes it from him, and uses the buckle to damage Johnny's car. Later, Johnny uses his belt to beat the crap out of Lilith Spain.
* DownInTheDumps: Johnny and Kyra hide Dan and Leticia's bodies in a garbage dump that they are led to by Raymondo. There is a lot of SceneryGorn.
* TheDrifter: Dan, before settling down in Tuscon after falling in love with Leticia, used to just aimlessly wander the American Southwest.
* DuctTapeForEverything: Dan bandages himself back together with duct tape after being mangled and shot by Johnny and Kyra.
* DueToTheDead: Before going after Johnny and Kyra, Dan makes sure to give Leticia a proper burial in the place where they first met, Cuervo Canyon.
* DumbMuscle: Johnny is a bit thick, with Raymondo opining that his thoughts very rarely involve anything other than eating, fucking, and fawning over his 1949 Mercury.
* EeriePaleSkinnedBrunette: Kyra's hair is black, and her complexion is "dead white."
* EarnYourHappyEnding: After Dan dies for good stopping Johnny and Kyra, his spirit wakes up in a phantom version of Cuervo Canyon, where it is implied that he is reunited with Leticia.
* TheEndOrIsIt: The book ends with Lilith Spain stumbling onto Kyra's grimoire and Raymondo.
* EmbarrassingLastName: Erik Hearse's actual last name is Hershkowitz.
* EurekaMoment: Kyra's visions lead her to Lilith Spain, more specifically Lilith's eyes. After interrogating Lilith fails and Raymondo discerns that there is nothing special about her, Kyra angrily throws her knife into a wall. As Raymondo stares at the blade, he notices his reflection in it, and realizes that Lilith's eyes are not what is important, it is what they have seen (namely, while Lilith was staring out her window and through her reflection at a massive columbarium) that is.
* EroticAsphyxiation: The sex that Johnny and Kyra have in a mausoleum is... rough, with lots of biting, slapping, nail-scrapping, and windpipe squeezing.
* EvenBadMenLoveTheirMamas: Johnny gets mad when Raymondo insinuates that his mother was a whore, though this may have only been due to ParentalSexualitySquick.
* EvenEvilHasStandards:
** Going by his reaction, Johnny is at least a little disgusted by Raymondo's "sick-ass" joke about digging up and consuming the ribs of graveyard corpses, insisting, "I don't dig long pig" and "I ain't no cannibal." Ironically, Johnny's girlfriend, Kyra, is a cannibal (not that Johnny is ever made aware of this).
** Kyra apparently finds Jim Morrison obscene, throwing one of his [=CDs=] out the car window while sneering, "I'm not listening to any crotch grabbers."
* EvilIsBigger: The crows that Kyra summons to attack Dan's crow are all way bigger than Dan's crow.
* EvilIsPetty: Johnny never just parks in one spot, he always takes up several, including as many as four at once when he parks outside of The Little Chapel of the Stars.
* EvilSorceror: Kyra, thanks to her TomeOfEldritchLore.
* EvilTowerOfOminousness: While not evil, the columbarium is very ominous, being the final resting place of all of the previous Crows.
* EvilWearsBlack: Johnny and Kyra only wear black, with the latter's wedding dress even being black.
* EyeScream: Kyra gouges out Leticia's eyes, and magically replaces her own with them by eating them.
* FacialHorror: One of Erik Hearse's security guards gets his face completely blown off by a grenade that was lobbed at him by Johnny.
* FanBoy: Johnny is a massive one for horror musician Erik Hearse, though this does not stop him from trashing and ransacking Hearse's home, or from planning to kidnap Hearse's wife for ransom.
* FangsAreEvil: Raymondo's teeth are all filed to razor-sharp points.
* FantasticFragility: Resurrecting Dan leaves the crow weakened to the point that it becomes vulnerable to being killed through conventional means, in spite of its HealingFactor.
* FatAndSkinny: When Johnny and Kyra crash The Little Chapel of the Stars, they interrupt the nuptials of an immensely fat woman named Krystal and her scrawny, acne-ridden groom, Dwayne.
* FeatheredFiend: Kyra enthralls a massive amount of normal carrion crows to guard Dan and Leticia's bodies from the mystical crow that wants to revive Dan.
* FinGore: Dan gets two fingers sliced off during his fight with Johnny.
* FlippingTheBird: Since he can never seem to come out on top whenever he and Raymondo bicker, Johnny usually just resorts to giving Raymondo the finger, which Raymondo sardonically remarks is "Johnny Church's patented postmodern peace sign."
* ForcedToWatch: Kyra makes Johnny watch as she damages his car with Johnny's own belt buckle, and after incapacitating Dan during their fight, strings him up with the intention of having him watch as she steals all of the powers of the crows.
* FreudianExcuse: Even though Kyra idolized her musician father, he hated her and saw her as nothing but a stifling burden, at one point even hitting Kyra so hard that she was PunchedAcrossTheRoom. Kyra was afterward dumped on seemingly apathetic relatives, and grew up a bullied and occult-obsessed loner, one who engaged in mindless sex and drug use and anything else "that could make her feel." While living on the streets, she was taken in by a gang who used her for Satanism-themed pornographic videos under the pretense of the gangbangs being SexMagic. When she realized that they were frauds, but that their grimoire was real, Kyra burned all of the Satanists (and one innocent girl, not that she cared about that) alive, and then, as instructed by the grimoire, committed ritual suicide in the belief that the crows would resurrect her as a Crow, giving her the power to right everything that was wrong with her miserable life. When the crows rejected her, Kyra swore revenge, and set out to steal the powers of the crows.
* FullFrontalAssault: Kyra wears nothing but boots and a tattered raincoat during her fight with Dan.
* GenuineHumanHide: Kyra's grimoire is bound in human skin.
* TheGhost: Horror musician Erik Hearse is mentioned throughout the book, but never actually appears. The finale takes places in his mansion and the adjoining cemetery, but he is not present, having gone on a business trip to Los Angeles.
* GildedCage: Annoyed by Lilith Spain's unwillingness to have any part in his Hollywood plans, Erik Hearse begins keeping her hidden away in his luxurious mansion, where Lilith is attended to constantly by people who have been hired by Erik to keep her away from drugs.
* GlasgowGrin: Johnny gives Dan one of these during their fight, all the while screaming about how he is going to carve Dan up "like a Halloween pumpkin!"
* GoodScarsEvilScars: Dan has a badass scar through one of his eyebrows, acquired in a brawl, while Kyra has an ugly purple-hued mark on her neck, caused by the rope that she used to hang herself during her InterruptedSuicide.
* GoodShepherd: Father Cooke is an alcoholic with next to no passion for his job, but he is still a decent guy, holding Dan's hand and praying for him after Dan is seemingly killed (again) by Johnny and Kyra.
* GoryDiscretionShot: Kyra eating Leticia's eyes occurs "off-page." It is still obvious what happened, though.
* {{Goth}}: The villains are a goth occultist couple who wear all black, are heavily tattooed and pierced, and go by the names Johnny Church and Kyra Damon.
* GreaterScopeVillain: Whatever it is that "lives" in Kyra's grimoire. As the crow explains, its power is equal to that of the crows, and it is their antithesis, a being that is "evil, black and pure."
* GuttedLikeAFish: Dan kills Johnny by disemboweling him with a Bowie knife.
* HandCannon: Johnny's preferred weapon is a .357 Magnum.
* HeelRealization: Kyra, right before she is hanged by Dan.
--> She looks into Dan Cody's eyes, and for the first time she sees the pain there, and she almost understands the agony he feels when he looks at her face and sees the eyes of his love locked in a skull where they don't belong.\\
"You... took... everything!" he says.\\
And Kyra knows that he is telling the truth. Suddenly, it all seems as simple as a fairy tale, and she's surprised to find that she's the villain. The witch who casts spells in a castle tower. Kyra knows her fairy tales. She knows what they do to witches. They hang them. That's what they do. And the rope is already around her neck.
* HellbentForLeather: Johnny and Kyra both wear a lot of leather, all of it black, of course.
* HeroStoleMyBike: Dan loots the offices of the dump where his body was left, making off with clothes, a jacket, CoolShades, twenty-three dollars, a blanket, a shovel, a pick, and an old Chevy Apache. Later, he breaks into a store and makes off with duct tape, a shirt, a cap, another pair of sunglasses, a map, and a Bowie knife.
* HollywoodSatanism: While homeless, Kyra fell in with a Satanic cult. They turned out to be nothing but smooth-talking posers who just used her for their pornographic videos, but the grimoire that they used as a prop in those videos turned out to be very real.
* HorrifyingTheHorror: Johnny is a vicious thug and a horror fanatic, but even he finds Kyra's grimoire creepy, to the point that he refuses to even touch it unless he absolutely has to.
* HugeGuyTinyGirl: Johnny (a big, muscular punk) and Kyra (a "junkie-thin" waif).
* IcyGrayEyes: Johnny's eyes are gray, and noted to be as pale and cold as "the dead side of the moon."
* TheILoveYouStigma: Dan has to practice saying "I love you" while on his way to proposing to Leticia.
* ImHavingSoulPains: As soon as Johnny and Kyra are wed, Dan is overcome by excruciating pain that leaves him helpless as he is subjected to a NoHoldsBarredBeatdown by Kyra.
* ImmortalitySeeker: Kyra's main reason for wanting to become a Crow is the immortality and the accompanying HealingFactor.
* INeedAFreakingDrink: Brian Brunswick Cooke, the minister of The Little Chapel of the Stars, hates his job, and is TheAlcoholic.
* InterruptedSuicide: Kyra committed ritual suicide in the belief that the crows would resurrect her as a Crow. After they rejected her, she would have died had she not been found and saved by Johnny.
* InTheBack: Johnny shoots Dan in the back while Dan is crawling towards his Jeep, and later repeats the act outside of The Little Chapel of the Stars.
* ItsAllAboutMe: Kyra does not truly care about Johnny or Raymondo, and while Raymondo has an inkling of this, Johnny does not, and goes along with Kyra because he cares about her (albeit in a warped way) and because she has led him to believe that they will be together forever once they acquire and share the powers of the crows (in reality, while Kyra theorized that the powers could be split, she did not really believe that they could be).
* JacobMarleyApparel: Leticia is still missing her eyes (not that this seems to handicap her in any way) when she appears to Kyra in the Land of the Crow.
* KickingAssInAllHerFinery: Kyra is still wearing her wedding dress when she lays siege to Erik Hearse's mansion, though she discards it before her fight with Dan.
* KneeCapping: After shooting Dan in the shoulder, Kyra follows it up by shooting him in the left knee.
* LanguageBarrier: The crow can only be understood by the dead, who hear it speaking plain English while everyone else just hears "caw, caw."
* LoveFatherLoveSon: Erik Hearse was utterly obsessed with actress Amanda Irons, and only married her daughter, Lilith, because she was "as close as he'd ever get to his very first wet dream." He sees Lilith as little more than another Amanda-related collectible, and basically wants to sculpt and refashion her into Amanda 2.0.
* LeanAndMean: Kyra, in contrast to her muscular boyfriend, is "junkie-thin."
* LighterAndSofter: While the book does get dark in places and has high stakes, it is nowhere near as grim as most other ''Crow'' stories, and frequently verges on being a BlackComedy.
* MagicalNativeAmerican: Leticia's unusual blue eyes made her a {{Seer|s}}.
* MaritalRapeLicense: After he and Kyra get married, Johnny tries to forcibly consummate their vows, feeling like he is now entitled to do whatever he wants to Kyra.
* MeetCute: Dan and Leticia first bumped into each other (almost literally) while they both happened to be out scorpion wrangling in Cuervo Canyon.
* MistakenForRacist: Leticia assumes that Johnny and Kyra are white supremacists, and while they do make numerous insensitive remarks about Leticia's Native heritage, they also make it clear that what they are doing has nothing to do with racism.
* MixedAncestry: Leticia's mother was a full-blooded Crow of the Mountain Crow Nation, while her father was Irish-American.
* MsFanservice: Kyra spends a lot of the book naked, and has a graphic sex scene with Johnny.
* MultipleGunshotDeath: Dan dies from being shot in the shoulder, knee, and back.
* MysteriousPast: Johnny is the only main character whose past is not delved into at all, a possible commentary on how, at the end of the day, he was ultimately unimportant and just Kyra's lacky, as Dan's crow more or less states during a discussion with Dan.
* NameThatUnfoldsLikeLotusBlossom: Leticia Dreams the Truth Hardin.
* NoHoldsBarredBeatdown: Kyra, using her stolen Crow strength, subjects Dan to one of these, and later does the same to Johnny.
* NothingButSkinAndBones: When Kyra comes face to face with Lilith Spain, she notes that Lilith is so emaciated that she could count "the woman's vertebrae as easily as pearls strung on a necklace."
* ObviouslyEvil: Leticia bluntly notes that Johnny looks "like a Halloween costume come to life--a black leather Frankenstein with brands and tattoos instead of stitches, piercings instead of metal bolts and clamps... a man cobbled together from personal nightmares."
* OldDarkHouse: Erik's Hearse's mansion is big, gothic, and situated on the California coastline next to a CreepyCemetery.
* OnlyKnownByTheirNickname: We never learn Kyra's real name, with the same possibly being true of Johnny.
* OutlawCouple: Johnny and Kyra, who Dan even compares to Charles Starkweather and Caril Ann Fugate.
* PainfulTransformation: Kyra magically replacing her own eyes with Leticia's eyes is incredibly painful, bringing Kyra to her knees while she stifles a scream.
* ParentalSubstitute: While not overt, it is clear that Dan sees Doctor Carlisle as a maternal figure, while Carlisle herself sees Dan as something of a son, which is what led her to set him on the path to meeting Leticia.
* PetTheDog:
** It is noted numerous times that Johnny resuscitating Kyra after she hanged herself was a purely selfless act, and probably about the only genuinely altruistic thing that Johnny has ever done, even if it made him an UnwittingInstigatorOfDoom.
** Johnny and Raymondo terrorize one of Lilith Spain's attendants, but after getting the information that they need from her, they walk away while telling her, "You've been a great help. You can go now." While the woman does get shot by Kyra while walking out the mansion's front door, it is unclear if Johnny and Raymondo knew that this would happen, or if they were even aware that it did, making it kind of an AmbiguousSituation.
* PiranhaProblem: Raymondo was gnawed on by piranhas before being finished off by a CannibalClan.
* PistolWhipping: Johnny pistol-whips Leticia hard enough to instantly knock her out, later doing the same to Ella Valentine and Dwayne.
* PoliticallyIncorrectVillain: Johnny and Kyra crack jokes about smoke signals, Indian paintbrush, and teepees at Leticia's expense, and call her "Pocahontas."
* PragmaticVillainy: Johnny and Kyra do their best to avoid killing people, though only out of fear of supernatural retribution, which is exactly what happens when they get sloppy and murder Dan and Leticia.
* PummelingTheCorpse: After struggling to haul Dan's body up a mountain of garbage, Johnny kicks it as Raymondo quips, "That's mature, Johnny."
* QuirkyTown: Invoked by Johnny when Kyra warns him to be careful while out in public with Raymondo.
--> '''Johnny:''' Baby, this is Vegas. Pirate ships sink every hour. Volcanoes blow up every fifteen minutes. White tigers fuck in front of an audience every five seconds. Elvis still walks these streets. No one's going to notice anything.
* RageAgainstTheMentor: After having a particularly nightmarish vision, Dan holds his crow at gunpoint, angrily demanding that it answer his questions about Kyra. The two fight for a bit before the crow finally concedes and gives Dan an InfoDump in the Land of the Crow.
* RedAndBlackAndEvilAllOver: Kyra wears all black and has black hair, which is frequently described as having an odd crimson sheen.
* RiddleForTheAges: Who built the Crow columbarium? Who adds to it? Who maintains it?
* RobbingTheDead: Johnny and Kyra steal Dan's wedding ring and leather jacket, and also eat the food that was left in a grandmother's mausoleum.
* ScaryScorpions: The book opens in a town called Scorpion Flats, famed for the resin-encased scorpions that are made and sold by the Spirit Song Trading Post. Dan catches them for Leticia to sell, and throws a bag of them at Kyra, who is able to NoSell their stings and venom due to her magic.
* TheSheriff: He is a RabidCop, at least according to Dan.
* ShrunkenHead: Raymondo, of the OracularHead variety.
* SingleTear: As Johnny is proposing to Kyra, Kyra briefly loses control of her stolen eyes, which shed a single tear for their actual owner, Leticia, and her fiancé, Dan. The crow later finds the tear stain in the dirt, with it being implied that it has permanently marked the earth.
* SinisterMinister: The missionaries that Raymondo was killed alongside made him an honorary holy man as they died, so he officiates Johnny and Kyra's Satanic wedding.
* SoulEating: It is implied that Kyra stealing the powers of the crows will result in her somehow assimilating or devouring the souls of all of the previous Crows.
* TheSoulless: The crow calls Johnny this, though more as an insult than a literal statement of fact.
* SpreeKiller: Johnny and Kyra... sort of. They actually spend most of the book trying to ''avoid'' killing people due to PragmaticVillainy, and so only have a small (by ''Crow'' story standards, at least) bodycount of seven, with five of those deaths all occurring during the siege of Hearse Manor.
* SupernaturalSensitivity: Raymondo can "sniff out" if there is anything special about a person, and this is how he discerns that Lilith Spain is little more than an EmptyShell.
* TalkingToTheDead: Lilith Spain is so out of it that she talks to Johnny's corpse, and gets miffed when it does not say anything back.
* TakeThatKiss: During their showdown, Kyra mockingly kisses Dan.
* TattooedCrook: Johnny and Kyra both have tattoos, the former in particular having a lot.
* TerribleTrio: The villains consist of a beautiful witch, her thuggish lover, and their sassy ShrunkenHead advisor.
* TheyDo: Dan and Leticia were killed while the former was planning on proposing to the latter, and Johnny and Kyra use the couple's stolen ring to get married at The Little Chapel of the Stars.
* TitleDrop: Close enough.
--> '''The Crow:''' Like many others, Kyra Damon summoned me with a prayer... a wish for strength everlasting and vengeance and immortality. But her '''prayer was wicked''', and she was undeserving, and I turned her away.
* TomeOfEldritchLore: Kyra's grimoire. Who wrote it and when is unknown, but it is bound in human flesh and written in blood, and is implied to house an EldritchAbomination.
* TongueTrauma: Kyra cuts out a rude saleswoman's tongue, and throws it in the garbage.
* TorsoWithAView: The super strong beating that Kyra gives Dan, coupled with Johnny shooting Dan at point blank range with a .357 Magnum, leaves a gaping hole in Dan's torso.
* TragicDropout: After her mother died, Leticia dropped out of grad school to help her father run the Spirit Song Trading Post.
* TwoFirstNames: The protagonist is named Dan Cody.
* TheUnchosenOne: Kyra committed ritual suicide in the belief that the crows would resurrect her as a Crow. When they rejected her, she swore revenge.
* TheUnfettered: Johnny dramatically claims to be this during a discussion with Raymondo.
--> '''Johnny:''' Truth? Dropped that word from my vocabulary a long time ago, little buddy. Along with a fistful of other words: conscience and morality, guilt and innocence, responsibility and obligation. While I was at it, I shit-canned all those little phrases most people live by: A penny saved is a penny earned... Brush after every meal... Truth, justice, and the American way. Said adios to ten fingers' worth of commandments, too. "Thou shalt not kill" was one of my favorites. I tell ya, Raymondo, the only church I attend is the Church of Johnny. To me, every day is about nothing more than me and mine.
* WatchThePaintJob: Johnny loves his car, so when he pisses Kyra off, she punishes him by going to town on it with Johnny's belt buckle as Johnny ScreamsLikeALittleGirl.
* WickedCultured: Kyra only listens to classical music, and is a big fan of Peter Warlock.
* WorstWeddingEver: Krystal and Dwayne have their wedding at The Little Chapel of the Stars crashed by Johnny and Kyra. Johnny fires warning shots, pistol-whips the chapel owner and Dwayne, kicks the photographer, shoots the doves, shoves Krystal aside, duct tapes the priest's mouth shut, and forces him to hold Kyra's grimoire and Raymondo while Raymondo officiates Johnny and Kyra's Satanic wedding.
* VillainousCheekbones: While describing Kyra, Leticia notes that she has "model-high cheekbones" that are made all the more prominent by how unnaturally pale and tight her skin is.
* VillainsOutShopping: The villains banter and bicker while driving, eat barbecue and have sex in a cemetery, and go sightseeing and shopping (with money acquired through armed robbery) in Las Vegas.
* VivaLasVegas: Johnny and Kyra hold their Satanic wedding in a dingy Las Vegas wedding chapel called The Little Chapel of the Stars.
* YouHaveOutlivedYourUsefulness: While Kyra does enjoy Johnny and Raymondo's company, she does not actually care about them, only seeing them as tools who she will abandon once she steals the powers of the crows. When she assumes that Dan killed Johnny, Kyra shrugs and says, "The way I see it, you did me a favor. I was about to dissolve my partnership with Johnny, anyway."
* YouNeedABreathMint: When the terrified Father Cooke gasps in shock, Johnny takes a step back, surprised by how badly the preacher's breath stinks of Irish whiskey and peppermint, noting that it could "choke a leprechaun."

----

* TomeOfEldritchLore: Kyra's grimoire. Who wrote it and when is unknown, but it is bound in human flesh and written in blood, and implied to house an EldritchAbomination.

An ex-drifter named Dan Cody is on his way to propose to his girlfriend Leticia Dreams the Truth Hardin, a half-Crow Native who runs a small Arizona tourist trap called the Spirit Song Trading Post. Unfortunately for Dan, a pair of goth occultists named Johnny Church and Kyra Damon have beaten him to Leticia, whose unusual blue eyes they need for their quest to steal the mythical powers of the crows. After killing Dan and Leticia, the evil duo take Leticia's eyes, seal her and her boyfriend's bodies in an old refrigerator, and resume their journey, guided by Kyra's grimoire and a sassy ShrunkenHead named Raymondo.

* CannibalClan: Raymondo ran afoul of one of these while leading missionaries through the Amazon in 1919. They killed him, and then turned what was left of him over to their medicine man, who proceeded to turn Raymondo into a ShrunkenHead.

* ChainedByFashion: Kyra's necklace is a small chrome chain, which she uses to hide the scar left from her InterruptedSuicide.

* CoolAndUnusualPunishment: After Johnny pisses her off by trying to rape her, Kyra punishes him by forcing him to watch as she wails on his car with Johnny's own belt buckle.

* DuctTapeForEverything: Dan bandages himself up with duct tape after being mangled and shot by Johnny and Kyra.

* TheEndOrIsIt: The book ends with Lilith Spain stumbling onto Kyra's grimoire, and Raymondo.

* HellbentForLeather: Johnny and Kyra both wear a lot of leather, all black, of course.

* ImHavingSoulPains: As soon as Johnny and Kyra are wed, Dan is overcome by excruciating pain that leaves him helpless as he is subject to a NoHoldsBarredBeatdown by Kyra.

* InterruptedSuicide: Kyra committed ritual suicide in the belief that the crows would resurrect her as a Crow. After they rejected her, she would have died had she not been found and saved in time by Johnny.

* AndIMustScream: After Dan hangs her, Kyra wakes up in the Land of the Crow, hanging from a tree and surrounded by angry crows who are preparing to attack her, the implication being that she will savaged by them for the rest of eternity as punishment for her crimes against them.

* BattleInTheRain: Dan and Kyra's showdown takes place during a storm, which is fortuitous, as Dan is able to use the rain to weaken Kyra by washing the eldritch symbols on her body off.

* ForcedToWatch: Kyra makes Johnny watch as she damages his car with Johnny's own belt buckle, and after incapacitating Dan during their fight, strings him up with the intention of having him watch as she steals all of the power of the crows.

* HeroStoleMyBike: Dan loots the offices of the dump where his body was left, making off with clothes, a jacket, CoolShades, twenty-three dollars, a blanket, a shovel, a pick, and an old Chevy Apache. Later, he breaks into a store makes off with duct tape, a shirt, a cap, another pair of sunglasses, a map, and a Bowie knife.

* ItsAllAboutMe: Kyra does not truly care about Johnny or Raymondo, and while Raymondo has an inkling of this, Johnny does not, and goes along with Kyra because he cares about her (albeit in a warped way) and because she has led him to believe that they will be together forever once they acquire and share the power of the crows (in reality, while Kyra theorized that the power could be split, she did not really believe that it could be).

* LanguageBarrier: The Crow can only be understood by the dead, who hear it speaking plain English while everyone else just hears "caw, caw."

** It is noted numerous times that Johnny resuscitating Kyra after she hanged herself was a purely selfless act, and probably about the only genuinely altruistic thing that he has ever done, even if it made him an UnwittingInstigatorOfDoom.

* SoulEating: It is implied that Kyra stealing the power of the crows will result in her somehow assimilating or devouring the souls of all of the previous Crows.

* TheyDo: Dan and Leticia were killed while the former was planning on proposing to the latter, and Johnny and Kyra use their ring to get married at The Little Chapel of the Stars.

* VillainsOutShopping: The villains banter and bicker while driving, eat barbecue and have sex in a cemetery, and go sightseeing and shopping (with money that they stole from people) in Las Vegas.

* YouHaveOutlivedYourUsefulness: While Kyra does enjoy Johnny and Raymondo's company, she does not actually care about them, only seeing them as tools who she will abandon once she steals the power of the crows. When she assumes that Dan killed Johnny, Kyra shrugs and says, "The way I see it, you did me a favor. I was about to dissolve my partnership with Johnny, anyway."

An ex-drifter named Dan Cody is on his way to propose to his girlfriend Leticia Dreams the Truth Hardin, a half-Crow Native who runs a small Arizona tourist trap called the Spirit Song Trading Post. Unfortunately for Dan, a pair of goth occultists named Johnny Church and Kyra Damon have beaten him to Leticia, whose unusual blue eyes they need for their quest to steal the mythical powers of the crows. After killing Dan and Letisha, the evil duo take Letisha's eyes, seal her and her boyfriend's bodies in an old refrigerator, and resume their journey, guided by Kyra's grimoire and a sassy ShrunkenHead named Raymondo.

An ex-drifter named Dan Cody is on his way to propose to his girlfriend Leticia Dreams the Truth Hardin, a half-Crow Native who runs a small Arizona tourist trap called the Spirit Song Trading Post. Unfortunately for Dan, a pair of goth occultists named Johnny Church and Kyra Damon have beaten him to Leticia, whose unusual blue eyes they need for their quest to steal the mythical powers of the Crows. After killing Dan and Letisha, the evil duo take Letisha's eyes, seal her and her boyfriend's bodies in an old refrigerator, and resume their journey, guided by Kyra's grimoire and a sassy ShrunkenHead named Raymondo.

* AndIMustScream: After Dan hangs her, Kyra wakes up in The Land of the Crow, hanging from a tree and surrounded by angry crows who are preparing to attack her, the implication being that she will savaged by them for the rest of eternity as punishment for her crimes against them.

* DissonantSerenity: As Johnny and Kyra are laying siege to her mansion, Lilith Spain shoots up on drugs, leaving her too blissed out to care when Johnny and Kyra (who Lilith deludedly believes to be her own ghost) barge into her room and begin demanding answers about the powers of the Crows.

* ForcedToWatch: Kyra makes Johnny watch as she damages his car with Johnny's own belt buckle, and after incapacitating Dan during their fight, strings him up with the intention of having him watch as she steals all of the power of the Crows.
* FreudianExcuse: Even though Kyra idolized her musician father, he hated her and saw her as nothing but a stifling burden, at one point even hitting Kyra so hard that she was PunchedAcrossTheRoom. Kyra was afterward dumped on seemingly apathetic relatives, and grew up a bullied and occult-obsessed loner, one who engaged in mindless sex and drug use and anything else "that could make her feel." While living on the streets, she was taken in by a gang who used her for Satanism-themed pornographic videos under the pretense of the gangbangs being SexMagic. When she realized that they were frauds, but that their grimoire was real, Kyra burned all of the Satanists (and one innocent girl, not that she cared about that) alive, and then, as instructed by the grimoire, committed ritual suicide in the belief that the crows would resurrect her as a Crow, giving her the power to right everything that was wrong with her miserable life. When the crows rejected her, Kyra swore revenge, and set out to steal the powers of the Crows.

* ImmortalitySeeker: Kyra's main reason for wanting to become a Crow is the immortality and accompanying HealingFactor.

* ItsAllAboutMe: Kyra does not truly care about Johnny or Raymondo, and while Raymondo has an inkling of this, Johnny does not, and goes along with Kyra because he cares about her (albeit in a warped way) and because she has led him to believe that they will be together forever once they acquire and share the power of the Crows (in reality, while Kyra theorized that the power could be split, she did not really believe that it could be).

* SoulEating: It is implied that Kyra stealing the power of the Crows will result in her somehow assimilating or devouring the souls of all of the previous Crows.

* YouHaveOutlivedYourUsefulness: While Kyra does enjoy Johnny and Raymondo's company, she does not actually care about them, only seeing them as tools who she will abandon once she steals the power of the Crows. When she assumes that Dan killed Johnny, Kyra shrugs and says, "The way I see it, you did me a favor. I was about to dissolve my partnership with Johnny, anyway."

* ItsAllAboutMe: Kyra does not truly care about Johnny or Raymondo, and while Raymondo has an inkling of this, Johnny does not, and goes along with Kyra because he cares about her (albeit in a warped way) and because she has led him to believe that they will be together forever once they acquire and share the power of the Crows (in reality, while Kyra theorized that the power could be split, she did really believe that it could be).

* BleachedUnderpants: Lilith Spain's S&M-themed vampire films include the regular versions, and the bootleg hardcore ones.

* ChainedByFashion: Kyra's necklace is a small chrome chain, which she uses to hide the scar left from her InteruptedSuicide.

* CreepyCemetery: The villains eat barbecue and have sex in one, and the final takes place in another near Hearse Manor.

* DissonantSerenity: As Johnny and Kyra are laying siege to her mansion, Lilith shoots up on drugs, leaving her too blissed out to care when Johnny and Kyra (who Lilith deludedly believes to be her own ghost) barge into her room and begin demanding answers about the powers of the Crows.

* EvilTowerOfOminousness: While not evil, the columbarium is very ominous, being the final resting place of all previous Crows.

* FacialHorror: One of Erik Hearse's security guards gets his face completely blown off by a grenade lobbed at him by Johnny.

* FreudianExcuse: Even though Kyra idolized her musician father, he hated her and saw her as nothing but a stifling burden, at one point even hitting Kyra so hard that she was PunchedAcrossTheRoom. Kyra was afterward dumped on seemingly apathetic relatives, and grew up a bullied and occult-obsessed loner, one who engaged in mindless sex and drug use and anything else "that could make her feel." While living on the streets, she was taken in by a gang who used her for Satanism-themed pornographic videos under the pretense of the gangbangs being SexMagic. When she realized that they were frauds, but that their grimoire was real, Kyra burned all of the Satanists (and one innocent, not that she cared about that) alive, and then, as instructed by the grimoire, committed ritual suicide in the belief that the crows would resurrect her as a Crow, giving her the power to right everything that was wrong with her miserable life. When the crows rejected her, Kyra swore revenge, and set out to just steal the powers of the Crows.
* GenuineHumanHide: Kyra's grmoire is bound in human skin.

* GreaterScopeVillain: Whatever it is that "lives" in Kyra's grimoire. As the crow explains, its power is equal to that of the crows, and is their antithesis, a being that is "evil, black and pure."

* MaritalRapeLicense: After he and Kyra get married, Johnny tries to forcibly consummate their vows, feeling like he is now entitled to do whatever he wants with Kyra.

* MistakenForRacist: Leticia assumes that Johnny and Kyra are white supremacists, and while they do make numerous insensitive remarks about Leticia's Native heritage, they also make it clear that what they are dong has nothing to do with racism.

* PainfulTransformation: Kyra magically replacing her own eyes with Leticia's eyes is incredibly painful, causing Kyra to fall to her knees while she stifles a scream.
* PetTheDog: Johnny and Raymondo terrorize one of Lilith Spain's attendants, but after getting the information that they need from her, they walk away while telling her, "You've been a great help. You can go now." While the woman does get shot by Kyra while walking out the mansion's front door, it is unclear if Johnny and Raymondo knew that this would happen, or if they were even aware that it did.

* PragmaticVillainy: Johnny and Kyra do their best to avoid killing, though only out of fear of supernatural retribution, which is exactly what happens when they get sloppy and murder Dan and Leticia.

* RobbingTheDead: Johnny and Kyra steal Dan's wedding ring and leather jacket, and also eat the food that was left in a grandmother mausoleum.

* SupernaturalSensitivity: Raymondo can "sniff out" if there is anything special about a person, and this is how he discerns that Lilith Spain is little more than an EmptyHusk.