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.

Half the Blood of Brooklyn by Charlie Huston
Trade Paperback, 223 pages
ISBN: 9780345495877
Available Now
Retail Price $13.95
Third in the Joe Pitt series

I have read each of these books in one sitting because they do not lend themselves to being set aside. The pace is too brisk to stop for chapter breaks and, in many cases, periods. There’s a scene of mass destruction in this one that would make grammar purists’ heads explode with its half page of run-on action, but the characters didn’t have the luxury of stopping for breath, and forcing the reader to do so would have ruined it.

I’m not a fan of trade paperback (I’ve been told repeatedly they cost less to produce, so why do they cost twice as much as mass market, hmm?), but you get a lot for the money in this case: Vampire gang wars. Chopped-up bodies. Hardcore vampire circus freaks (dude chews out his own intestines—for real). Misogynistic Jewish vampires with delusions about what it means to cherish their women. A preop transsexual vampire. Several thousand occurrences of the most versatile word in the English language. And… epic romance?

Damn skippy. In Book One, it’s made clear Joe’s ladylove is the one thing he values. In Book Two, it’s made clear he’ll do anything for her. In this, Book Three, the relationship reaches a crisis point, and it looks like Book Four is going to largely revolve around the fallout. But I’m getting ahead of myself there.

Joe Pitt is a vampire. He’s never found the right time to tell his girlfriend, Evie, he’s a bloodsucking denizen of the night, excusing his aversion to sunlight as solar urticaria and the guns and injuries and bags of blood in his fridge as stock in trade for his made-up job of black market organ courier.

Yeah, I told my girl a lie. Just one on a long list. Once you skip over telling someone the part about needing to consume blood in order to feed the Vyrus that’s keeping you alive, there isn’t much room for truth in a relationship. [p.23]

Foul! No lies allowed in romance!

Now that I’ve recovered from my incapacitating laughter, shall we continue?

Vampirism is caused by a Vyrus. (I’m sure Joe had something wise to say about the spelling in Book One. Don’t get your knickers in a twist—this is the only use of creative spelling in these books.) Evie has a different virus: HIV. They don’t engage in any activities that involve swapping of bodily fluids because she worries about infecting him. Joe knows he can’t catch what she has, but he’s not 100 percent sure he won’t transmit something to her that will take her out of the light and turn her into a predator.

Joe was on his own for a lot of years, trying to fly just under the radar of all the Clans (territorial gangs of various persuasions), doing odd jobs for them now and again so they’d leave him in relative peace. He took a job with one of the Clans, knowing choosing sides would make him dangerously unpopular with the other Clans and also that his inability to play well with others would probably get him killed by his own organization, but he took that job to get the boatload of money required to pay for Evie’s treatment.

At this point, though, Evie’s not doing well. She’s in the hospital, wasting away, being eaten alive by Kaposi’s sarcoma with a tracheostomy tube because she has herpes lesions in her throat… She’s getting ready to die, in other words, and Joe has a decision to make. His Vyrus will cure what ails her, but it will also consign her to a life he hates.

I think about the night we met.

I think about putting a hand over the end of the tube.

I touch the scabs that have grown over the part of my ear the Count didn’t rip off my head and think about peeling them away and leaning over the bed and pressing the wound to Evie’s lips and finding out what kind of girl she really is.

What kind of man I am. [p.82]

I’ve read two series by Charlie Huston, and the man likes to make his characters suffer. Everything that can go wrong will… and then everything that couldn’t possibly go wrong because obviously everything is going to work out for the best will take the bullet train straight to hell.

Joe’s not the type of guy to waste time on reflection and regret after the fact. If he doesn’t care, he shrugs it off and gets on with his life. In the few cases when he does care, he fixes it. There’s a lot of fixing to be done at the end of this one because the one thing Joe cares for the most couldn’t get much more wrong.

I know it will. I just can’t see how that’s possible yet.

I think you could probably read this book without having read the previous installments and be engaged enough by this one story, but the experience will lose something without a background in the relationship dynamics, so—as always—I recommend starting with the first book in the series.

Already Dead
No Dominion
Half the Blood of Brooklyn

I have received a complaint that my “reviews” are biased because I have nothing but good things to say about every book I “review.”

You got me. I am Kaiser Sose Harriet Klausner.

It takes time, thought, effort, and usually a second read to write anything about a book. If I feel like the first read was a waste of time, I refuse to devote more time to the book in question. I won’t even do it for books I merely like, of which there are many. If I’m going to spend more time with a book beyond the last page, it’s because it was so exciting, I want to read it again right away.

If you want bad reviews, there are hundreds of sites in which the reviewers apparently have never read a book they liked. I want to make it perfectly clear right now that this is never going to become one of those sites. The worst trash talk you’re going to get from me is a Reader Peeve or a visit from The Editing Police, either of which may be provoked by a certain book, but since the infractions are rarely unique, I’m still not singling out that particular book or author for ridicule.

Most review sites are a lot like the news. The snapshot presented is that everything is terrible and the world is going to hell, except substitute “all books published today” and “the publishing industry” for the topics under fire. All the focus is on the negative, and it paints a very gloom-and-doom picture that I strongly feel is inaccurate. It’s fine if you’re a “misery loves company” kind of person, but I, for one, have outgrown that phase.

I know the world is full of bad people, tragic events, and lousy books. I’d rather hear about the good all of the above for a change. Instead of complaining about all the negativity (which only adds to the negativity being complained about, a cause-and-effect many people don’t seem to understand), I have made a conscious and deliberate decision to introduce a positive element by sharing my appreciation of books I enjoyed reading.

In conclusion, this blog isn’t a review site. It’s not my job or my hobby to discourage anyone from buying a book I don’t like. I am aware that a book I consider to be a waste of a good tree may be someone else’s favorite book ever, and I’m not interested in challenging that person’s opinion, to which he or she is entitled, by enumerating what I perceive to be its flaws. There is nothing to be gained by anyone if I say, “I hated this book.”

On the other hand, if I think a book is exceptionally good and describe why I think so, someone may say, “Hmm, the things she mentioned make me want to read that book.” Then the writer sells a book, the reader hopefully finds a great read, and everybody benefits.

It’s my tiny little contribution to making the world a more pleasant place in which to live.

Holy Smokes by Katie MacAlister
Mass Market Paperback, 341 pages
ISBN: 9780451222541
Available Now
Retail Price $7.99
Fourth in the Aisling Grey, Guardian series

I’m not even going to do one of my half-assed, tangential reviews, and here is why:

1. It’s fourth in a series and WHOADAMN does it not stand alone. Aisling and Drake you could jump into just fine, but without the political history of the septs, the Guardians, the princes of Abadon, at least two other organizations Aisling has run afoul of in the past, you might as well read the foreign-language portions of your DVR manual for all the sense this story would make.

2. Describing the events in any Aisling book will cause your audience to wonder what you’ve been smoking. Chica is living ma vida loca in a big way.

I finished it in one sitting, and it did elevate both my mood in a general sense and my reading blahs. Jim, the demon Newfoundland, is as irreverent as ever (particularly hilarious toward the end—I had to read that part out loud to explain my gut-busting laughter). Drake’s “Eyebrows of Extreme Displeasure” cracked me up, too. Fiat’s still a rank bastard, and Uncle Damian is just freakin’ awesome (I want one of those).

I predict having Chuan Ren in proximity to Bael is going to be bad news.

I was so disappointed in MacAlister’s last vampire novel, I was worried what would happen with this book, but I’m happy to say it upholds the fine tradition of nuttiness I’ve come to expect from this series.

Book One: You Slay Me
Book Two: Fire Me Up
Book Three: Light My Fire

Tempting Danger by Eileen Wilks
Mass Market Paperback, 301 pages
ISBN: 9780425198780
Available Now
Retail Price $7.99
Book One in a series

I feel terrible about not posting this weeks ago, considering I said something like “more in-depth pimpage forthcoming, unless the author underwent a lobotomy and screwed up the rest of the book,” which is so not the case.

The thing I love most about this book is that it has many layers, and each has some bearing upon every other layer instead of being thrown in for the sake of stringing along the plot to meet the requisite length. It also makes it difficult to write about, so I’ll use a layers-based approach.

The Heroine: Lily Yu, San Diego homicide detective and “sensitive” (she can touch magic, basically). She’s leading the investigation of a savage murder in which the evidence so obviously points to one suspect, she has to consider it’s a setup.

The Hero: Rule Turner, rich playboy and poster boy for lupus-human harmony. He’s the too-obvious subject in Lily’s investigation.

These characters are multidimensional. Lily’s experience with the SDPD, and being a woman with the SDPD, rings true. You get a glimpse of her family life, which is also multifaceted. Her Gift is useful but can be unpleasant and has to be used on the sly. You see Rule as a playboy, a friend, a brother, a son, a father, a diplomat for his clan, and a wolf. They’re both very well drawn.

The Murder: The dead guy was mauled by a werewolf. Rule was “dating” the dead guy’s wife (as well as half the women in San Diego), but he’s not possessive since fidelity is an alien concept to lupi. Furthermore, the dead guy encouraged his wife to screw around so she’d get off his back about his own indiscretions, so there’ s no reason for either of these guys to get hostile. Someone is clearly framing Rule, but why?

The Politics: There’s some lingering human prejudice against lupi, and there are lupi who aren’t on board with assimilating into human culture and giving up their own.

Rule’s papa is the leader of their clan and is recovering from a recent attempt on his life, the attack led by their own kind. Had the assassination been successful, Rule would have assumed his father’s position as clan leader. For such a high-profile lupus to end up in prison on a murder charge would severely damage public opinion of the lupi and put the kibosh on the Species Citizenship Bill coming up in Congress, which Rule’s father supports but many humans and lupi alike are violently opposed to.

The Larger Problem: The barriers between worlds are shifting, and badnasty sorcerers are doing what they can to speed that along so they can invite their goddess over for a little slumber party. Their goddess has personal reasons for wanting lupi reviled and exterminated, so she’s also lobbying against the Species Bill, in a manner of speaking.

The Lurve: Gah, it’s a “soul mate” kind of thing, but I forgive because it’s not the same old. Of course Rule is attractive and charismatic, but Lily has more than a whoa-baby reaction to him, something she mistakes initially for hypoglycemia. They can be only so far apart without suffering physical symptoms. The distance waxes and wanes, but the leash gets pretty short at times. They’re both ambivalent about it, Lily because she doesn’t like not being in control of it and Rule because having a Chosen is such a rare thing, it’s kind of a religious event, something that will isolate him further from other members of his clan. Both agree the relationship apart from the sex will take time to develop, but they have liking and mutual respect going for them already, which is more than most couples can say.

The investigator shtupping a suspect is bad, you say? Well, duh. I assure you, Detective Yu shtups no one (which is not to say there’s no shtupping in this book, but you’ll have to read the book to find out how she gets her man without being a horrible cop). She’s actually far more concerned with upholding the letter of the law than most fictional cops, which is refreshing.

The Deepest Impression, For Some Reason: You get to see Rule in his role as clan bigshot, which is a balancing act between dominance and diplomacy. There’s a scene like that in every wolf book, right? Well, Rule actually applies these skills outside of pack gatherings, demonstrating they’re ingrained and not just for special occasions. His relationship with Dirty Harry, Lily’s 17-pound, battle-scarred, territorial cat is an excellent example. He meets the cat on its own level, takes his lumps, and respects Harry’s position in the household—which is, in typical feline fashion, lording over all the lowly bipeds. That he has that much regard for an ill-tempered cat inspires confidence that he will handle his woman with appropriate respect (which he does, by the way).

The Warning: There are loose ends. Most of the threads are satisfactorily tied in a bow at the end, but there are unsettled relationship issues and Larger Problem issues still pending resolution. There is a Book Two of Lily and Rule before Book Three goes to Cullen (tonight, the part of the Morally Ambiguous Outcast Kerry Always Falls For will be played by Cullen…). To the commitmentphobes out there, this one is good enough to overcome your series allergy.

The favorable comparison to J.D. Robb’s In Death series held up on the second read through. If you like one, you’ll probably like the other.

Cybermancy by Kelly McCullough
Mass market paperback, 278 pages
ISBN: 9780441015382
Available Now
Retail price $6.99
Second in series 

The world may have relegated the gods of Olympus to mythology, but they’re still around and on the cutting edge. That’s right, all those badass immortals and their misbegotten, inbred descendants have gone digital, plugged into their own magical, mystical network called the mweb.

Mixing magic with computer code has changed the way my family works at every level, merging hacker with sorcerer, and forever scrambling the logical and the irrational into one big WYSIWYG mess. I’m sometimes tempted to agree with the traditionalists in the pantheon that all this newfangled computer stuff is a royal pain. Then I actually have to perform a spell, and I’m reminded just how much less dangerous magic has become since the advent of the mweb and the birth of digital sorcery.

Doesn’t “digital sorcery” set your interest all atingle? Makes me want to use big words like “juxtaposition.” Smashing the modern and the arcane together has made for a train wreck in less capable hands, but McCullough turns it into the most mind-bending joyride I’ve been on all year.

In WebMage, intrepid demigod and hacker extraordinaire Ravirn saved the universe but in the process pissed off pretty much everybody who’s ever set foot on Olympus and was disowned, stripped of his name and redubbed Raven (which he hates), and saddled with a new destiny in which he has zero interest and does his best to ignore.

He has more immediate problems at the start of Cybermancy, namely retrieving the soul of his girlfriend’s webgoblin from the underworld to atone for getting her killed in the first place—without getting eaten by Cerberus or caught by Hades or otherwise trapped in the land of the dead with no escape route. Not enough pressure? Ravirn apparently didn’t think so, so he swore a blood vow; therefore, if he fails to free Shara from Hades, the Furies are going to hunt him down and subject him to 33 flavors of slow, painful death.

Ravirn’s not big on planning, since the variables invariably blast big, smoking holes in the best of plans, so his M.O. is to rely on his wits and the occasional intervention of dumb luck, remain flexible, and be prepared for everything to go tragically wrong.

The rescue is going unusually smoothly, until Persephone catches Ravirn hacking the Lord of the Dead’s computer. She’ll keep her mouth shut and even facilitate the rescue, but she wants a favor in exchange. Dude, that is never a good thing, but respectfully declining isn’t exactly an option.

Ravirn’s feeling pretty confident after getting Shara and himself out of the underworld, until it becomes apparent that “tragically wrong” has come to pass. While he was affecting the daring rescue, the mweb became corrupted and dangerously unstable, causing some degree of upset within the mystical community, and guess who’s taking the blame?

Ravirn has to find out what’s going on in order to clear his name before his death warrant is issued. He has to fix the problem because, aside from the inconvenience and dangers of losing the mweb, without it, what’s a master hacker to hack? And through it all, he must also deal with a wisecracking webgoblin, a three-headed dog with multiple personality disorder, an all-star cast of unfriendly deities, relationship woes (the woman he loves doesn’t seem to fully reciprocate, while one of the Furies has a crush on him but will crush him the minute he’s marked for execution), and his pesky new destiny, which he must embrace in order to survive.

Just. Freakin’. Awesome.

And now for some pointless rambling:

I never realized what a cutesie, romanticized version of the Hades/Persephone story I’d been fed. The one presented here is a lot more realistic… and a whole lot uglier.

I’m no computer whiz. I can perhaps use more programs than the average man on the street and do some minor troubleshooting, but I can’t write a program or hack the Treasury Department (or even straighten out my own web site…). My ignorance in no way diminished my enjoyment of this tech-heavy book. I may even be the ideal reader because if the tech logic is flawed, I wouldn’t know, and I’m able to roll with the unknown.

Perhaps it’s the familiar frame of the Greek pantheon being navigated by a young, leather-clad misfit that makes it so accessible to me overall.

Because the events in Cybermancy are largely set in motion by and frequently reference those in WebMage, I strongly recommend reading the latter first. Actually, I recommend reading it because it’s a damn good book, but I think it’s pretty necessary background to guide you through  Cybermancy. I foresee much lostedness for those diving into Book Two without some existing familiarity with the players and the worldbuilding.

Tempting  Danger by Eileen Wilks

I stopped in the middle to order more, and as long as I’m at the computer and in the grip of a Good Book High, I thought I’d pimp a little. (More aggressive pimping to follow when I finish… assuming the end doesn’t fall apart as if the author underwent a lobotomy mid project.)

Parallel That Comes Closest to Expressing This Book’s Awesomeness: Think J.D. Robb’s In Death series, if Roarke was a werewolf and the setting was more magical than futuristic. Not in a blatant ripoff kind of way, but if one appeals to you, I’m pretty certain the other will. (I refrain from absolute certainty only because there’s always one screwball in the bunch.)

And there’s even a morally ambiguous outcast for me to covet! Could I be any happier? Lemme check… um, no!