Lizzie needs an
instruction book - being a demon slayer is definitely not a learn-on-the-job
profession.
But she has no time
to study - her uncle has fallen into the clutches of a succubus in Las Vegas.
But on arrival there’s far worse than just one man’s life at stake - the entire
city is under threat, none of her friends can help and Dmitri, the powerful
griffin she loves, is dangerously compromised
The first book in
this series has enough plot points to intrigue me - while also having a lot
more elements I didn’t enjoy quite so much. I was hoping the balance reset and
we saw more of the fish-out-of-water Lizzie trying to establish very normal
self in the wild and whacky world of elderly biker witches and demons and
griffins.
And… we didn’t really
get that?
I kept checking to
see if I’d skipped a book because Lizzie has suddenly developed a weird level
of self-reliance. A major side plot, perhaps the entire theme of this book, is
Lizzie trying to drive everyone off and insisting she has to do all this alone…
and… since when? By the time line of the book she’s been doing this for about 2
or 3 weeks? But now she’s making multiple comments on how she needs to do all
this alone, she doesn’t need help and… this would work in say, book 5? But now
it’s odd: where did this come from?
It doesn’t help that
we don’t have any real revelations of this book - or any development of the
world building that would justify this level of confidence. One of the comic
relief elements of this book is the fact she’s given a provisional license.
That she doesn’t know how to be a demon slayer. She comically fails the test.
She has a huge, and good, epic rant about how her mother had all the training
and experience and she was just winging it. She even starts writing a book -
The Dangerous Book of Demon Slayers - to guide others because they’re so rare
and there’s so little guidance. Her approach to other supernatural in this book
is, naturally, confusion
So why the
self-reliance? Why the confidence? When she was asked to levitate her response
was literally “I didn’t know we could do that!!!”
What matches this
confusing lack of character development is a rather equal lack of world
development. The witches use magic - which basically means icky things to freak
Lizzie out - and I say again what a shame this is. These witches, all
older people, were driven out of their home and away from their own traditions
and had to hit the road, developing their own cobbled together magic as bikers,
transients, people without herb gardens or supplies. I would loved to have seen
more of magic, the witches and their cobbled together need to use floss and
mouth wash and road kill etc. This is such an utterly fascinating unique
concept while,
ordinary-woman-who-throws-shit-at-demons-while-whining-and-has-a-cute-animal-companion
is dullllll and done done done.
We had ghosts in this
book. We had fae. We had people saying fae are discriminated against, we had
clearly other supernaturals, a bureaucracy, licensing for practitioners, a
fairy godfather and OH MY GODS SHE DOESN’T QUESTION ANY OF IT. It’s just like
“hey, this exists” which is great - but we never go beyond that. Give me depth
Because without a
compelling, developed main character, without a compelling, developed world
we’re left with the plot which, I’m afraid, also doesn’t pull me in. Like the
characterisation, it’s not actively awful, it’s just lacking anything to drag
me in. They arrive in town to find and save Lizzie’s uncle and manage to find
and lose him. And then we just have a whole waffly bit in the middle Dmitri is
in trouble, Uncle Phil is in trouble and they don’t seem to actually do a whole
lot? There’s just a lot of flabby waffle round the centre of this book, lots of
fretting over Dmtri (but not fixing it), lots of worrying whether they can
trust a demon hunter (but not doing anything to find an answer for this), lots
of fretting over the growing number of succubuses…. And there’s a lot of “oh we
have no time!!!” DO SOMETHING THEN!!!!
It’s not bad, I have
to stress that, none of this is bad - but none of it is GOOD either and the
stuff that could be good - the biker witches, the slayer who risks his humanity
to save humanity, the time manipulating fae - just don’t get any development.
There’s also this
ongoing angst because Lizzie has corrupted Dmitri’s “pure griffin blood” by
bringing him back from the dead in the first book and infecting him with her
essence. She’s super guilty about this and there’s a weird way she kind of
forgets that it was to SAVE HIS LIFE not for funsies. And that ends up with the
feeling that maybe he’d rather have died than be “corrupted” and how important
“blood purity” is which… eeeehhhhhh
Speaking of - 2-3
weeks. Saying “I love you” at this stage is just kind of weird guys. I have no
idea why you’re both THIS invested in your relationship.
The ending also
annoyed me. After so much frustration waiting for something to happen that I
was really excited that it finally did and there’s a big confrontation and it’s
shiny and I’m happy and thrilled and ready - and she pulls the biggest
random-power-arse-pull I’ve seen outside of an Anita Blake novel.
Rando-ridiculously-over-powered-super-power-from-nowhere to the rescue!
Few things ruin a
book series’s moments of dramatic tension than knowing the protagonist can pull
god powers out of her arse to fit whatever situation
Also, honestly, some
of these characters should have died. One in particular. Raise the stakes
already!
Diversitywise it was
lacking. We had some awesome older women in the biker witches but didn’t
develop them. The big bad are succubuses (not even the odd incubus) so there’s
all that evil sexy woman gender binary heterosexualness. We have a few bit part
POC - but they are just that, bit parts. And calling the Asian instructor the
“dragon lady” is a bit of racial coding no-one asked for
This book series is
going to be one that torments me. It will torment me because it’s not awful
enough for me to seethingly read it and then let loose in the review. Because
it isn’t. It’s not BAD, it’s just blah. But nor is it boring enough for me to
abandon completely and, worst of all, it has these amazing, awesome nuggets of
potential awesome right there and I think every book you could start excited
because if just one of those nuggets pays off...
