Jericho. By Alex Gordon. Harper Voyager. $14.99.
Hellhound Chronicles, Book 1:
Black Dog. By Caitlin Kittredge. Harper Voyager. $14.99.
Hellhound Chronicles, Book 2:
Grim Tidings. By Caitlin Kittredge. Harper Voyager. $14.99.
In her first novel, Gideon, Alex Gordon (the pen name of
Kristine Smith) showed herself able to create an effective genre thriller in
which, despite a plethora of “of course” moments, the overall effect was of a
book with strikingly original elements. True, the preponderance of the material
fit squarely within the genre – all that stuff about the undiscovered past, the
thinness of the barrier between our world and the world beyond (or spirit
world, or what have you), the need to come into one’s powers even if one has
never known they existed, etc. But for all those formulaic plot points, and
others, Gideon was ultimately a very
effective ghosts-and-good-and-evil story, and Gordon was adept at including
within it real-world elements (a still-unexplained 19th-century cold
snap, the Great Chicago Fire of 1871) and giving them just enough of an eerie
twist so that the real world and the supernatural one of the book seemed almost
to touch. With Jericho, Gordon has
another chance to extend the supernatural-thriller genre; and while she never
quite rises to the challenge here either, she again shows that she can handle a
plot well, write with skill and even at times with considerable style, and
create characters with whom the reader can both sympathize and empathize.
Foremost among them are protagonist Lauren Reardon, heroine of the first book,
who has now come fully (maybe not quite
fully) into her powers as a witch-guardian of the world’s thin places against
the demons who constantly seek to push through them; and, to a lesser extent,
Virginia Waycross, whom Lauren has replaced as Mistress of Gideon, the Illinois
town whose name was the title of the first book. Jericho takes Lauren far from Gideon, to her own roots in the
Pacific Northwest, as she is called – or beckoned to a trap – by disturbing
voices that tempt her by offering the peace that she has only known, however
imperfectly, in a place far from Gideon and a time before she learned of that
troubled town and its many dark secrets. What Gordon does well here, as she did
in the previous book, is to show what a burden
it is to know and possess magic, how uncomfortable it is and how disturbing,
how much it exposes its possessor to experiences that, even when they do not
involve evil, can be sensorily overwhelming: few readers will want to be able
to read others’ thoughts after contemplating the sorts of things that Lauren
“hears” when she does just that. Lauren is drawn to the depths of a strange
Oregon forest because of who and what she is, and even if the trappings of
events there – the eerie sounds, rumored disappearances, odd spots of unnatural
quiet – are formulaic, Lauren is a sufficiently three-dimensional character so
that her responses ring true. True, Gordon has not quite found a way to bring
Lauren’s fullness of personality to other creations: the first chapter of Jericho is almost embarrassingly bad,
with every trope of the supernatural thriller and horror film tossed in
willy-nilly, from the “troubled but obviously doomed character completely
isolated, against everyone’s better judgment” to the “meaningless noises that
of course will prove deadly.” Jericho,
like Gideon, revolves around Lauren,
and when she is center stage, the book is exciting, even gripping. When she
interacts with other characters, including Virginia and a woman named Connie
who has died and become a river (one of Gordon’s more-intriguing notions),
those characters too become interesting, their concerns and fates involving.
Gordon has created a highly believable character in Lauren, and if not
everything else in Jericho is equally
well-done, there are enough thrills, chills and hard-to-predict plot twists in
the events that befall Lauren to keep readers captivated by this story and looking
forward to others in the future.
There is nothing the
slightest bit believable in the character named Ava who is the center of
Caitlin Kittrege’s Hellhound Chronicles
– except perhaps the backstory in which she was so terribly abused by a
boyfriend that she made a horrendous after-death choice that gave her a second
chance of existence, of sorts, but that landed her in the predicament
underlying this dark urban fantasy series. Readers who find Ava’s no-nonsense,
no-remorse, get-even-with-the-world attitude attractive will find both Black Dog and Grim Tidings to be exhilarating thrill rides. Those who deem Ava
one-dimensional, almost a parody of the take-no-prisoners,
get-back-at-everybody loner, and those who do not enjoy intense scenes of
violence (including torture), will have little reason to read the books and
will find little to enjoy if they do. But fantasy of this sort does tend to
split readers in ways that other fantasy does not: heroic fantasy in the
Tolkien mode, for example, may produce enjoyment or indifference, but fantasy
of the Hellhound Chronicles type
tends to bring with it greater intensity of both devotion and dislike. To give
her credit, Kittredge does not flinch from the sorts of details that give this
genre its flavor; she actually seems to relish them. The idea is to be over-the-top
without ever falling into self-parody, and Kittredge knows how to do that. Black Dog sets the stage for the series,
sometimes rather confusingly, through multiple overlapping plots. The basic
notion here is that Ava has spent the past century as a hellhound, a servant of
the Reapers, who collect damned souls but cannot actually spend much time on
Earth and therefore need creatures like Ava to do their dirty work. Admittedly
this makes little sense, but as with Ava’s personality, a reader either accepts
it or looks for something else to peruse. Ava uses an object called a Scythe,
which may or may not be an actual scythe, to gather souls, although she can
also assume hound form and rip souls from bodies with her teeth. Ava’s reaper
boss, Gary, is evil, sadistic and generally disgusting, and in Black Dog Ava decides she has had enough
(for various reasons) and is going to destroy him. Unfortunately, Gary also has
a boss, who turns out to be a genuine, full-fledged demon named Lilith – yes, that Lilith – and Lilith makes demands
of Ava that are intended to further Lilith’s goal, which is the usual demon
goal of unleashing unspeakable hellspawn on Earth to wreak havoc and all that.
Again, this is as formulaic as it can be, but readers willing to accept it at
face value will enjoy the intensity. Ava ends up getting together with a
necromancer named Leonid Karpov, who is also a mobster and whom readers first
meet when he is torturing Ava for information. Despite this inauspicious
beginning, Ava and Leo soon form an alliance to go after the soul of one Clint
Hicks, for complex reasons. Then it turns out that Hicks doesn’t actually have a soul, but does have it in for
Lilith, and soon he joins the other two in what is, just about literally, the
road trip from hell.
All that is in Black Dog, which lurches from plot
strand to plot strand and nearly goes awry toward the end, and which includes
one of the more uncomfortable sex scenes in recent books of this genre (and not
uncomfortable because of torture: it is just plain awkward). The very, very end
of the book works well, though, and nicely sets up Grim Tidings, in which Ava has become a hellhound-without-master
and Leo has become, guess what, the, yes the,
Grim Reaper. This is significant. Also significant are elements of Ava’s past
hellhound activities, which start to have repercussions in the present. The
most important of these involves a particularly nasty character simply called
the Walking Man, whom Ava defeated back in the Nazi era (Nazis-era baddies are
always reliable super-evildoers) but whom she didn’t really quite destroy.
Oops. And now there is an army of zompires on the loose, tied to the Walking
Man. Wait – zompires? Oh yes: the intelligence of vampires plus the behavior of
zombies gives you zompires. There is something rather funny about all this, and
indeed there is humor in these books, often of a rather lowbrow sort. Of course,
the humor is dark – everything is
dark here – but what is especially funny in Grim
Tidings is that the zompire monsters are first sighted in…Kansas. Oh my.
Clearly, Toto, we are not in Kansas anymore. The point of all this, to the
extent that there is one, is that readers who enjoy the urban-fantasy genre and
prefer their protagonists blood-soaked, unrepentant and intense as all, well,
hell, will find Kittredge’s Hellhound
Chronicles just their cup of…hmm, “tea” seems like an awfully mild beverage
to associate with all this. Of course there is always blood, but perhaps
something even more intensely intoxicating is called for. What sort of
pick-me-up would a hellhound prefer, anyway?
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