Lexa’s family had
every privilege - of course they did, they paid for it with Lexa’s soul.
She always knew that
some day her demonic master would come to collect - but who knew that would be
the least of her concerns with cultists, vampires and, most of all, the Four
Horsemen of the Apocalypse riding free
The demonic mark on
her body may make her invincible but with the apocalypse rising even she may
not survive this
A lot happens in a
very brief space of time in this book. It doesn’t exactly make it hard to
follow per se, I mean I could tell exactly what was going on but it felt rushed
without a lot of layers.
We open the book
introduced to our protagonist, Lexa is a woman whose soul has been sold to some
mysterious demon by her parents when she was still in the womb. While this has
the nice benefit of being unkillable and presumably other side effects to being
soulless, it also means she lives with the knowledge her parents sold her soul.
This comes with like, ALL the parental issues and understandably - I mean we
have parents who are not necessarily bad and are quite caring and a very privileged
upbringing but that undertone of them having sold her soul colours their entire
relationship. But we don’t really have time to explore it and instead we just
end up with a bad mother character and a loving father character who gets
written out before his position on the pedestal can be made more complicated or
nuanced
And because the four
horsemen of the apocalypse land so quickly after the book starts we never
really get a chance to see Lexa’s relationship with them - or even what being
marked actually means. This happens for a few other baseline things we start
the book with - like her friend David, a 300 year old warlock. This means… I’m
not even sure. He has magic and he’s old so he has knowledge which makes him
quite useful to Lexa but I would have liked seeing more time of them together,
more time to show the relationship and why this relationship is actually there.
Or even what a warlock actually is.
And this could work
is, during the plot, we actually worked with these relationships, but we hit
the ground running and we don’t really stop. But not only do we not really
stop, but the action is kind of disjointed. We have a cop who is also Marked
but apparently to a Greek god - and everyone just kind of runs with this
without explanation. Ok, how do they fit in this cosmology? What does this
mean?
And then there’s a pack of vampires who are involved for… reasons? I mean they may know about the potentially upcoming apocalypse but we’re not sure why or how and they can’t actually explain themselves but they spend so much time being menacing and misunderstood. And there’s the blood moon so badness is happening with them so, again, we never really develop any relationships or world building or what they mean because we have ACTION. And maybe could explore that but we also have a member of the party who can see the future and there’s a cult involved and she needs rescuing and why why why why why is this all here? Slow down, slow down, I can’t even remember any of these character’s names an-
SPIDER DEMON
What why why why
why?! Why do we have spider demon side quests? Is this the apocalypse? The
horsemen? Something else? Greek gods, are you involved? And now we’ve got these
two extra vampires running around and I don’t know who they are or how many
survivors there are and there’s a cute little girl whose all aaaaaahhh and is
Lexa in a love triangle with the head vampire (who is, I kid you not, called
Cloud because why not?) and her demonic master…?!
Oh and her demonic
master. It says everything about how utterly crammed this book is that he shows
up, drops his twist - but not what his motives are, why he wants her or what
his connection to the apocalypse actually is (and for some reason neither Lexa
nor anyone else even tries to question this) and he just kind of joins the
whacky gang running through the apocalypse for… reasons?
The thing is, none of
this is bad. The concept of the book is really excellent and I think there’s a
lot of complexity which can be explored in terms of who and what Lexa is. I
really like the complexity of the vampires, who they are, the different diets,
the implications and the bad press in the face of David’s suspicions, the
loyalty and sense of family they have. And there’s clearly a lot more to the
demonic master than we have been revealed and we’re going to get a lot of
twists and complex motives coming from this, inevitably
And while there are a
lot of fight scenes, they’re also very well written. The book is confusing but
it isn’t boring and the fight scenes are nicely paced with a lot of well
described action and experience and it does create a whole frenetic feel to the
book which probably would reflect the dawning of the apocalypse. These are good
things. We have some minimal diversity with some bit part vampires being POC
(and possibly one a lesbian by one potential throwaway comment?) and the
adorable moppet they end up dragging around with them being Latina, but it’s
not really noteworthy in any particular way
This book has a lot
going for it. It’s foundation is incredible. The writing is excellent. I’m
intrigued. I would read the whole series. The whole series, however, does not
need squeezing into this one book. No, it does not, save some for the sequels.
