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Jul. 10th, 2016 07:26 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png)
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!
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BECCA: That does fulfill one of my criteria!
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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!)