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This is one of the best and most entertaining fantasies I’ve read all year, with a compelling protagonist and plenty of new twists on old ideas. I highly recommend it. I also highly recommend that you avoid spoilers before reading it. If you click on the Amazon link, I suggest not reading any of the reviews.
Nick and Alan are teenage brothers who’ve been living on the run after demons killed their father and drove their mother insane. Periodically, the demons track them down, Alan kills some of them and Nick kills lots of them, and then they run again.
Nick is good at killing things. He’s not good at understanding other people’s emotions and relationships, or at having feelings himself other than killing rage, a bewildered contempt for most of humanity, sexual impulses, survival instincts, and a deep attachment to his brother that he doesn’t understand. One might expect a character with such a narrow range of emotion to get tiresome with long exposure, but the more I saw of Nick, the more intrigued I became.
This is just as well, because the novel is basically a character study with lots of plot and action, plus well-developed supporting characters. But it’s really all about Nick and how he sees the world, trying to puzzle out social interactions via the rules he thinks he’s deduced. Though he’s normally intelligent, his profound disconnect with emotions and human relationships makes him misunderstand or miss entirely all sorts of moments that the reader understands perfectly. At first this is often funny, but later on it becomes heartbreaking. If this sounds sentimental, keep in mind that I’m talking about a guy who seriously considers killing his own mother in order to save his brother and is baffled by the strength of his brother’s objection to this perfectly reasonable idea.
About all the rest I can say without spoilers is that there’s lots of banter, a fairly light tone for the most part with the darkness running mainly underneath, and a protagonist I wouldn’t want to meet but loved reading about, and haven’t been able to get out of my head since I finished the book.
View on Amazon: The Demon's Lexicon
( Beware enormous spoilers both below cut and probably in comments )
Nick and Alan are teenage brothers who’ve been living on the run after demons killed their father and drove their mother insane. Periodically, the demons track them down, Alan kills some of them and Nick kills lots of them, and then they run again.
Nick is good at killing things. He’s not good at understanding other people’s emotions and relationships, or at having feelings himself other than killing rage, a bewildered contempt for most of humanity, sexual impulses, survival instincts, and a deep attachment to his brother that he doesn’t understand. One might expect a character with such a narrow range of emotion to get tiresome with long exposure, but the more I saw of Nick, the more intrigued I became.
This is just as well, because the novel is basically a character study with lots of plot and action, plus well-developed supporting characters. But it’s really all about Nick and how he sees the world, trying to puzzle out social interactions via the rules he thinks he’s deduced. Though he’s normally intelligent, his profound disconnect with emotions and human relationships makes him misunderstand or miss entirely all sorts of moments that the reader understands perfectly. At first this is often funny, but later on it becomes heartbreaking. If this sounds sentimental, keep in mind that I’m talking about a guy who seriously considers killing his own mother in order to save his brother and is baffled by the strength of his brother’s objection to this perfectly reasonable idea.
About all the rest I can say without spoilers is that there’s lots of banter, a fairly light tone for the most part with the darkness running mainly underneath, and a protagonist I wouldn’t want to meet but loved reading about, and haven’t been able to get out of my head since I finished the book.
View on Amazon: The Demon's Lexicon
( Beware enormous spoilers both below cut and probably in comments )
