NINE WHITE STONES

Sorcerers, demons, and social justice warriors unleash hell on Earth in this fantasy adventure.

Ever since her girlhood hobby of carving Gaelic sayings into white stones opened her to supernatural intrusion, 28-year-old London security guard Shelby Schouwenaars has shared her body and consciousness with a demon. Named Fen, the entity manifests as a blue mist that gives her superhuman strength and self-healing powers. Their relationship eventually becomes a psychodrama of bickering and, somehow, sex, and Fen introduces Shelby to other sorcerers—humans like her who bond with demons that take the form of a muscular arm, a dagger, or a 7-foot-tall blue bodyguard. She soon gets embroiled in a conflict between sorcerer covens vying for the favor of the demon queen Lilith, which leads to several massacres, including Shelby’s slaughter of a Las Vegas sex coven after its head sorcerer rapes her. (She spares coven member Jenn Blake, a blacksmith with whom she begins a lesbian affair.) Fomenting the war is sorceress Monique D’Aubainne—her servants include a cherub demon that yanks out opponents’ internal organs—who plans to conquer the world by binding demons from the Nether plane to her followers. She recruits these followers with muzzy, left-ish speechifying, exhorting a campus Young Socialists of America group to “become one with every benevolent collectivist philosophy.” Hypnotized, they denounce “the virulent disease of capitalism” along with “masculinity, currency and fossil fuels”; don black garb; and revile Shelby as an “imperialist parasite.” Assisted only by Fen’s power mist, a 300-pound suit of armor and a 210-pound sword forged by Jenn, a Colt .45 pistol, and several attack helicopters, Shelby has to take on the demon-enthralled radicals and worse to thwart Monique’s scheme. In this vigorous yarn, Kazi crafts an intricate, richly drawn fictive world. Less successful are his ham-fisted parody of the woke left and the long scenes of splattery carnage, which feel monotonous after the umpteenth dismemberment. At one point, Shelby relates: “His torso rips off of his lower body and flies off to the side, while my follow-through catches another in the lower thighs, cutting him right off his knees, making everything above his lower legs flip and spin in mid-air, painting the entire corridor in blood.” The story is more gripping when it explores the twisty power plays of good-hearted characters coping with inner demons.

An imaginative, contemporary sword-and-sorcery epic hampered by cartoonish gore and heavy-handed politics.