EMBER OF NIGHT

A teenage girl joins forces with a divine being to fight the forces of hell in Lee’s cosmic fantasy YA romance.

Seventeen-year-old Chicagoan Harley Ward has an abusive, alcoholic father, and she has a plan to rent an apartment for herself and her 7-year-old sister when she turns 18. She usually has a firm grip on her emotions, but this changes when she meets Draven, an attractive guy with amber eyes, chiseled muscles, and a mischievous smirk, at a club; he later gets a job at the deli where she works. This complicates her relationship with her best friend, a nice boy named Kai. Things get more complicated when Harley is attacked by ghoulish men and a horde of zombies whom Draven and Coach Hale, Harley’s Krav Maga instructor, handily destroy. It turns out that Draven is a 500-year-old demon-fighting Judge, and Coach Hale is actually Anka, a good demon; the attackers were minions of “greater demon” Marid, and they were hunting Harley because she’s “the Key” that can release Marid from hell. Harley develops the ability to shoot flames from her fingers and gets a magic tattoo that temporarily shields her from Marid’s demons—although snake demons, alligator demons, terrierlike demons, and hypnosis demons continue to plague her. They have seven days—plenty of time for Harley to make out with Draven, but if he touches her for too long he could drain her of life. Over the course of this fantasy novel, Lee manages to work creatively from the familiar Buffy the Vampire Slayer template: an angst-y teen with the weight of the world on her shoulders battling a monster menagerie while navigating a relationship with a broody, dangerous boyfriend. Her prose is sharp and evocative whether the peril that Harley is facing is domestic (in the case of her father) or demonic (“One demon leaps and lands atop me, wrestling me to the ground with the weight of a fucking truck. Jesus, what do they feed these things? Bricks?”). The result is a lively, imaginative love story with plenty of hellish energy.

An entertaining fable with supernatural combat enriched with intricate psychology and passion.