Carpe Demon
Dec. 16th, 2009 03:01 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
stoutfellowI just finished Julie Kenner's Carpe Demon, the first of a series of books about a middle-aged demon hunter. Overall verdict: a fairly interesting Buffyesque story, comparable but inferior to, e.g., Robin McKinley's Sunshine. Further details under the cut.
The heroine (and first-person POV character) is Kate Connor, a suburban soccer mom. She has a loving husband and two children (one by a prior marriage), none of whom are aware that she was, until the death of her first husband, a member of an organization of demon hunters run out of the Vatican. The organization has two sorts of members: Hunters, highly trained in the martial arts and in the ins and outs of detecting and destroying demons, and alimentatori, who do research on the enemy and train Hunters. (Sounds familiar, no? At least there is no nonsense about "one girl in all the world" - Hunters may be male or female, and there are quite a few of them - and the Lovecraftean trappings of the Jossverse are also missing. The underlying world is that of traditional Catholicism.)
Kate has retired to a pleasant suburban life in the apparently demon-free town of San Diablo (and what kind of name for a city is that?), and is a decade or more out of practice when a demon comes crashing through the front window and tries to kill her. She finds herself sucked back into her old life, not without bellyaching (and considerable body-aching, as well), and with the aid of a new martial-arts instructor, another retired Hunter, and a new alimentatore, goes toe-to-toe with a High Demon who plans to build an army and sweep bloodily across the world.
As I said, it's fairly interesting; the plot twists are not as subtle as they could be, but it's a decent airport read. I'll probably continue with the series for another book or two, but I'm not expecting much more than "decent".
The heroine (and first-person POV character) is Kate Connor, a suburban soccer mom. She has a loving husband and two children (one by a prior marriage), none of whom are aware that she was, until the death of her first husband, a member of an organization of demon hunters run out of the Vatican. The organization has two sorts of members: Hunters, highly trained in the martial arts and in the ins and outs of detecting and destroying demons, and alimentatori, who do research on the enemy and train Hunters. (Sounds familiar, no? At least there is no nonsense about "one girl in all the world" - Hunters may be male or female, and there are quite a few of them - and the Lovecraftean trappings of the Jossverse are also missing. The underlying world is that of traditional Catholicism.)
Kate has retired to a pleasant suburban life in the apparently demon-free town of San Diablo (and what kind of name for a city is that?), and is a decade or more out of practice when a demon comes crashing through the front window and tries to kill her. She finds herself sucked back into her old life, not without bellyaching (and considerable body-aching, as well), and with the aid of a new martial-arts instructor, another retired Hunter, and a new alimentatore, goes toe-to-toe with a High Demon who plans to build an army and sweep bloodily across the world.
As I said, it's fairly interesting; the plot twists are not as subtle as they could be, but it's a decent airport read. I'll probably continue with the series for another book or two, but I'm not expecting much more than "decent".
