DANDELION AUDIT

A young man finds himself caught between the demons of Hell and the Queen of All Fae in Givler’s fantasy novel.

In the second installment of the author’s Debt Collection series, Matthew Carver has already lost his soul after having it unlawfully taken by a representative of Hell. Now he works for the immortal Orion, “master of the Hunt,” taking down demons and attempting to get his soul back. During one of these hunts, Matthew is about to be killed by the demon Zagan when he manages to blow on a dandelion, which calls the Faeries and transports him to their world: “The dandelion seeds in the ball-like head waved for a moment, as if my life’s last breeze was merely music for them to dance to…A few heartbeats later, the white head of the dandelion exploded, and seeds shot everywhere, thrown around like nature’s shrapnel. Impossibly, I felt something reach up and hook into my chest through the ground, and suddenly I was pulled downthrough the gravel as if it were water.” There he discovers, via his anthropomorphic fire friend Willow, that he is actually a Lord of Fire—the first in almost 400 years. And Gloriana, the Faerie queen, wants to strike a bargain: In exchange for marrying one of her four daughters and thus strengthening their bloodline, she will help Matthew regain his soul. Doing so is the best chance they have of preventing a “giant supernatural war” that Hell seems determined to ignite. As Matthew navigates the increasingly dangerous world of Fae politics, he begins to suspect that there’s a traitor in their midst. With the discovery that demons are more invested in the Faerie world than it seemed at first, Matthew faces some impossible choices—including whether to finally rescue his soul in exchange for damning his previously dead sister back down to Hell.

Matthew’s wit carries him far, with plenty of quips and self-deprecating jabs to keep readers amused even as his life crashes down around him: “All things considered, I’d like to congratulate myself on exceeding expectations. I killed an Immortal and survived a year on Lucifer’s Most Wanted list. If Vegas had been running odds on me, I could have made a fortune betting on myself. Granted, given that this was looking like my untimely demise, I wouldn’t have gotten to spend it, but I could have died with a smug sense of superiority, which would have been nice.” That being said, Givler still manages to imbue Matthew with a level of emotional depth that belies the steady stream of one-liners—evidenced mainly by his agony over the fate of his previously dead sister, who is now comatose and kidnapped. Meanwhile, the extensive discussions of soul-selling legality and its various loopholes prove delightfully absurd as they add a grounding mundanity to various fantastical scenarios. The novel’s action is steady but not rushed, while its scenes of violence (and there are quite a few) never become overly graphic. The book has a couple of stray typos, but nothing that would get in the way of readers immersing themselves in the intricately woven universes of mortals, demons, and Fae.

A sharp, fast-paced fantasy driven by witty characters, impressively complex worldbuilding, and emotional gut punches.