Kerry Allen

Personal Demons by Stacia Kane
Mass Market Paperback, 306 pages
ISBN: 9780809572557
Available Now
Retail Price $6.99
First in series

(For your viewing enjoyment, Chapter One can be found here.) 

This post can be subtitled: How Blogging Can Sell Books.

I’ve been reading the blog of Stacia Kane (aka December Quinn) for ages (or for LiveJournal fans, same content here). I find her blog writing funny and quick-witted and likable, so it stands to reason I’d find her fiction writing to be the same. Now, there are plenty of writers I like as bloggers but don’t read their books because the subject matter isn’t up my alley, but how could I resist this one?

Megan promises listeners to her her radio call-in show that she’ll “slay their personal demons,” and they believe her. So do the personal demons. Although she doesn’t know it, Megan is the only human without a personal demon on her shoulder. This, coupled with her psychic abilities, makes her a valuable weapon for any demon “family” that can gain her allegiance. It also makes her a serious threat—not just to the personal demons, but to a soul-sucker known as the Accuser, who has an old score to settle.

Dr. Meg is forced to use a ridiculous tag line about demon slaying on her call-in therapy show, and the demons take her literally, their response along the lines of: “Oh, you’re gonna slay us? Not if we slay you first, beeyotch!”

Immediately following her first show, Meg is paid a visit by tall, dark, and smexy Greyson Dante. First impression: Slick lawyer dude. Second: Yay, her very first stalker! Third: Is it wrong to be attracted to a crackpot with delusions that he’s a demon?

Meg has to accept the existence of demons when they start showing themselves and trying to kill her, but they’re not all bad. Grey is slowly but surely seducing her, and the three overzealous bodyguards he’s assigned to protect her 24/7 (privacy? fuggedabowdit!) put their lives on the line for her. Pretty much everybody else is trying to end her life, though, or at least ruin it. As resourceful as Meg is (FYI, in a pinch, you can beat a zombie to death with a showerhead), she needs all the help she can get to stay alive long enough to figure out why she’s really the object of all this demonic interest.

The story is told in limited 3rd person POV—you get only Meg’s version of events. So when Grey’s being all tight-lipped and enigmatic (99% of the time), you get to share Meg’s frustration for the duration because there’s no cutting to Grey to explore his innermost feelings. (Although the reader does have the advantage of being unclouded by that new-relationship insecurity Meg suffers. I mean, the man defies his very nature as a demon to protect her and do honorable things to please her. He’s obviously up to his sardonic brows in love with her.)

Although there are plenty of romantic sparks, Meg and Grey’s relationship isn’t the primary focus of the book, so I’d call this one UF with strong romantic elements. It’s bite-your-lip scary in places, fan-yourself sexy in others, and laugh-out-loud funny all over the place, the most all-around satisfying read I’ve had in a long time.

Why I love Meg: I’d hang out with Meg, and we’d have a blast. I wanted to high-five her at several points in the story, like here:

She’d won the battle. Was it worth torturing herself in order to get back at him?

Yes. Yes, it was.

She also has a lot of interesting stuff to grapple with (and I’m not talking about Grey). For instance, she doesn’t have an evil little imp on her shoulder pushing her to do wrong like everybody else does, but she hasn’t been a saint. Does that mean she’s naturally a bad person? 

Why I love Grey: Since I ended up with a list here, maybe I should revive HOTM for him. He’s a protector, at least when it comes to Meg. The rest of humanity? Couldn’t care less. Because he’s a demon.

“What did you expect demons to do, teach baking classes and have sewing circles? Fucking with humans is our purpose in life.”

He’s another one of those guys who is what he is and doesn’t feel the need to apologize for it—always a score with me.

Book the Second, Demon Inside, is scheduled to come out in 2009. It will be mine.

Also, many moons ago, Stacia/December was posting metrics from another WIP, Unholy Ghosts—stuff like word count for the day, rampant drug use (presumably in-story!), and a sample of what she’s dubbed Downspeak, which is a speech pattern for certain characters. I was charmed by the Downspeak (I can’t remember the last time I was charmed, but I’m fairly sure it was something by Dr. Seuss) and am jonesing for her Big New Agent to find that book a home so I can have it in my hot little hands sooner rather than later. Watch out for that one.