(no subject)

[skygiants]

nny recced me Mike Carey's Felix Castor books after we went to go see Crimson Peak last year.

BECCA: And so, based on this film, I have decided that what I really want is an ongoing television series about a plucky Victorian ghost-interviewing female duo!
nny: I cannot help you with the plucky Victorian female duo part, but the Felix Castor books involve an exorcist who eventually sort of starts siding with the ghosts?
BECCA: That does fulfill one of my criteria!
nny: Also there is a succubus who eventually settles down to attempt domesticity with her nice librarian girlfriend.
BECCA: ...you have my attention.

So now I have read all five of them that there are currently (and maybe forever? I'm not entirely clear), starting with The Devil You Know, in which exorcist Felix Castor is hired to get rid of a ghost at an archive, starts feeling guilty about casual exorcisms, and ends up solving her murder.

The books as a whole are set in a world that is basically just like ours, except ghosts and zombies and undead were-creatures and demons started popping up a few years ago and everyone knows about and is annoyed by them. The tone is very consciously noir. The streets are always mean, the skies are always grey, and Castor is 100% an eternally down-on-his-luck noir protagonist -- he's constantly getting beaten up, spending his last five dollars on a beer (where the subsequent last-five-dollars comes from is never entirely clear), accidentally uncovering the dark secrets and sleazy pasts of the people who are supposed to be paying him, pissing off one or another of his only three friends in the world, and reluctantly making moral decisions that mostly entail sulkily spitting in the face of someone a bit less moral than he is.

Aside from our hard-bitten down-on-his-luck protagonist, relevant recurring characters/forces include:

Nicky, a health-and-conspiracy-theory-nut zombie acquaintance of Castor's, who does research for him in exchange for old jazz records
Juliet, the aforementioned succubus, who turns up as a terrifying demon enemy to sexy-devour Castor in book one and eventually decides she'd like to stick around and become a.) an exorcist and b.) a lesbian
Rafi, Castor's buddy who got possessed by an extremely powerful demon a few years ago in an distressing event which was partly Castor's fault, and who now has to be kept in a silver-lined cell lest he go on a rampage
Pen, Castor's Wiccan landlady and Rafi's True Love, sort of
The Fanatical Catholic Exorcists, who keep wanting to recruit Castor
The Fanatical And Well-Funded Scientific Paranormal Researcher, who keeps wanting to recruit Castor and grab Rafi for experimentation

As in most noirs, there's a lot of every kind of violence (tw for pretty much every possible thing), a lot of people die, half the time Castor leaves things worse than he finds them, and there's a fair bit of male gaze throughout. (There's one hilariously egregious bit at the end of book two when Pen and Juliet and the little girl-ghost that Castor is trying to rescue that day are all tied up and unconscious, which, given that Juliet is inhumanly strong and has demonic superpowers, is notable.) Also, while Nicky and Juliet overall are by far the most interesting characters, I did not like at all the turn Juliet's storyline took in the fifth book.

All that said, they're entertaining reads, and have sort of filled the Rivers of London-shaped hole in my lineup while I wait to find out how a thing that happened a few books back gets resolved. (I like the Peter Grant books better than the Felix Castor books, but my expectations for them are also much higher, so there's a way in which they are much more stressful to read!)

Comments

[sdelmonte]

1. I really like this series. It's a cross between the various Constantine projects (Carey wrote Hellblazer for Vertigo some years back and is my favorite writer on that series) and the Dresden Files, but not really like either.

2. Carey also wrote an offbeat zombie novel called The Girl with All the Gifts (I think as MD Carey) that is supposed to be quite good, and is being made into a movie.

3. I have seen some suggestion that Carey plans more in the series, but between his other novels and his various comic book projects, I don't when it will be.

[skygiants]

Ha, I'm pretty sure you recced me these books on my post about The Girl With All The Gifts!

There's certainly more story to tell if hew ants, but -- although I did not like all the choices in the fifth book -- it wraps up enough big loose ends that it'd probably be fine as a series ending if that's how it goes.

[musesfool]

Yeah, I read these as sort of methadone for the Peter Grant books and enjoyed them, but for real, Castor does some really dumb stuff.

I also liked Paul Cornell's supernatural police procedurals The Severed Streets and I can't remember the other one's title. They start off slow but get interesting, or at least enjoyable in an airplane reading way, though I haven't read the third one yet, and there is a thing he does that made me side-eye the whole enterprise a little.

[skygiants]

In true noir protagonist style! The kind of books where you're like 'on the whole, your involvement was probably a net zero or a negative, POSSIBLY you should have stayed in bed instead.'

Hmm, I've not heard of the Paul Cornell!

[musesfool]

It's a good thing he's an exorcist and not a detective, because he is a REALLY BAD detective!

[skygiants]

That seems to be a problem with a lot of 'supernatural mystery-solving' books, honestly. Like, I only read the first four or five of the Toby Daye series, but bless her, Toby is a TERRIBLE DETECTIVE.

Though, again, those books are noir-ish too and it sort of falls into the noir playbook -- it's like, because our protags have to be constantly down on their luck, they can't ever really be too good at their jobs!

[kore]

I really wanted to like the Cornell books, but I wasn't into the first one, bounced hard off the second and the third one was kind of....idk.

I think the Matthew Swift books were my methadone for the Rivers of London series.

[musesfool]

And I bounced hard off Matthew Swift. I couldn't make it through the first 45 pages of the first one. It was so DIRE and SERIOUS and there was no dialogue or any sense of fun.

The Cornell books definitely start slow, but got more interesting to me, though they're still third tier behind Peter Grant and Felix Castor.

[kore]

Hee, mirror reactions! Those always intrigue me. (I really liked the first three or four? Swift books, and then there was a dire visit from the Japanese IIRC Fae Court, and then the series just went floomph.)

Maybe I should try the second or third Felix Castor books -- I loved that succubus.

[kate_nepveu]

I think Cornell has some super-grim stuff?

Might skip to the sequels to the Swift books, where there's a no-nonsense woman shaman who has little patience for the dumb things Matthew does?

[kore]

I did read those spinoff books! I really liked the first two, are there more?

[kate_nepveu]

Alas, no. But they were a very welcome change of pace and I actually like the Matthew Swift books!

[kore]

Aww. Yeah, the change in tone and characters was great. I'd happily read more of those.

[sovay]

Juliet, the aforementioned succubus, who turns up as a terrifying demon enemy to sexy-devour Castor in book one and eventually decides she'd like to stick around and become a.) an exorcist and b.) a lesbian

+1.

[skygiants]

RIGHT

[kore]

She is even more awesome than that sounds. I spent most of the first book being really sad she was not the star.

[kore]

I loved the succubus but was disappointed by how she was treated in the first book. It gets better in the later ones?

Also, as an American, I was mystified by 'tin whistle' until I finally looked it up.

[skygiants]

It does, until the last one, which I side-eyed in several ways. But I liked a lot of the stuff with her in the middle three!

[petra]

I adore Pen and Juliet. Castor is a device by which we get to see more of their adventures.

[skygiants]

I love Juliet, and I very much want to love Pen, but I feel like I don't know enough about her to love her as I want -- every time we sort of start to come to grips with her it veers off into 'AND SHE'S IN LOVE WITH RAFI, FYI, DID YOU KNOW' and yes, I know, I don't care, tell me more about Pen herself when she's not in the middle of a Rafi crisis!