Wow. Gripping. But smoke Lilith? Not likely. Next: The Damned.
Fifth in the Afro-American hip-hop Damali Richards Vampire Huntress series.
Damali’s lover, Carlos Rivera, was turned. So what’s a Vampire Huntress gonna do when her lover’s on the other team? In Bitten (2004), Carlos was led by the chairman of the Vampire Council, on the Dark Force’s sixth level of Hell, to impregnate Damali (after having bitten her) and thus to cause the Neteru (Damali), a creature born once in a millennium, to give birth to an Antichrist who will fight for the Dark Force when Armageddon bursts forth. But Carlos is lured by angels to fly into the Light and hence gets reduced to ash. Now, Damali plunges the powerful Isis blade into the heart of the ashes and Carlos bubbles up, rebuilt and confused but human once more. Damali has a miscarriage, bloodying herself, and Carlos vows revenge against the chairman. But Hell’s in turmoil. While Carlos, their master, was still ashes, many of his pack’s top vampires also turned to ash. And so the chairman has his problems. The seductress Lilith, next in power to the Devil, rises from the seventh and deepest level and tells the chairman that the Devil, fed up with him, has issued a bounty on Carlos and has freed were-cats and other demons from the upper five levels to hunt him down and return the Neteru so that a new Antichrist may be born. Carlos, no longer a master, worries that he’s human again, with no income and seemingly no superpowers. And he knows that Damali is the Neteru. About to be sterilized on a plane to the Vatican, Damali is carried off in an electric cloud to a conclave of goddesses in Philadelphia, among them the Eve whose Adam was seduced by Lilith, who then gave birth to demons. Now Lilith’s stolen Damali’s miscarried fertilized egg and will herself give birth to the Antichrist. The goddesses assign Damali one task: smoke the bitch.
Wow. Gripping. But smoke Lilith? Not likely. Next: The Damned.Pub Date: July 1, 2005
ISBN: 0-312-33622-5
Page Count: 480
Publisher: St. Martin's Griffin
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 15, 2005
An author to watch, Buehlman is now two for two in delivering eerie, offbeat novels with admirable literary skill.
Cormac McCarthy's The Road meets Chaucer's Canterbury Tales in this frightful medieval epic about an orphan girl with visionary powers in plague-devastated France.
The year is 1348. The conflict between France and England is nothing compared to the all-out war building between good angels and fallen ones for control of heaven (though a scene in which soldiers are massacred by a rainbow of arrows is pretty horrific). Among mortals, only the girl, Delphine, knows of the cataclysm to come. Angels speak to her, issuing warnings—and a command to run. A pack of thieves is about to carry her off and rape her when she is saved by a disgraced knight, Thomas, with whom she teams on a march across the parched landscape. Survivors desperate for food have made donkey a delicacy and don't mind eating human flesh. The few healthy people left lock themselves in, not wanting to risk contact with strangers, no matter how dire the strangers' needs. To venture out at night is suicidal: Horrific forces swirl about, ravaging living forms. Lethal black clouds, tentacled water creatures and assorted monsters are comfortable in the daylight hours as well. The knight and a third fellow journeyer, a priest, have difficulty believing Delphine's visions are real, but with oblivion lurking in every shadow, they don't have any choice but to trust her. The question becomes, can she trust herself? Buehlman, who drew upon his love of Fitzgerald and Hemingway in his acclaimed Southern horror novel, Those Across the River (2011), slips effortlessly into a different kind of literary sensibility, one that doesn't scrimp on earthy humor and lyrical writing in the face of unspeakable horrors. The power of suggestion is the author's strong suit, along with first-rate storytelling talent.
An author to watch, Buehlman is now two for two in delivering eerie, offbeat novels with admirable literary skill.Pub Date: Oct. 2, 2012
ISBN: 978-1-937007-86-7
Page Count: 432
Publisher: Ace/Berkley
Review Posted Online: Sept. 1, 2012
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 15, 2012
A charming and persuasive entry that will leave readers impatiently awaiting the concluding volume.
Book 2 of Hearne's latest fantasy trilogy, The Seven Kennings (A Plague of Giants, 2017), set in a multiracial world thrust into turmoil by an invasion of peculiar giants.
In this world, most races have their own particular magical endowment, or “kenning,” though there are downsides to trying to gain the magic (an excellent chance of being killed instead) and using it (rapid aging and death). Most recently discovered is the sixth kenning, whose beneficiaries can talk to and command animals. The story canters along, although with multiple first-person narrators, it's confusing at times. Some characters are familiar, others are new, most of them with their own problems to solve, all somehow caught up in the grand design. To escape her overbearing father and the unreasoning violence his kind represents, fire-giant Olet Kanek leads her followers into the far north, hoping to found a new city where the races and kennings can peacefully coexist. Joining Olet are young Abhinava Khose, discoverer of the sixth kenning, and, later, Koesha Gansu (kenning: air), captain of an all-female crew shipwrecked by deep-sea monsters. Elsewhere, Hanima, who commands hive insects, struggles to free her city from the iron grip of wealthy, callous merchant monarchists. Other threads focus on the Bone Giants, relentless invaders seeking the still-unknown seventh kenning, whose confidence that this can defeat the other six is deeply disturbing. Under Hearne's light touch, these elements mesh perfectly, presenting an inventive, eye-filling panorama; satisfying (and, where appropriate, well-resolved) plotlines; and tensions between the races and their kennings to supply much of the drama.
A charming and persuasive entry that will leave readers impatiently awaiting the concluding volume.Pub Date: Feb. 4, 2020
ISBN: 978-0-345-54857-3
Page Count: 592
Publisher: Del Rey/Ballantine
Review Posted Online: Nov. 24, 2019
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 15, 2019
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