Night Shift
by Lilith Saintcrow
352 pp. Orbit. $6.99
Reviewed by Paul Stotts
In today’s fantasy/sci-fi market, the popularity and proliferation of urban fantasy novels is staggering. Maybe it only seems this way, but every second book in the fantasy section at the local bookseller appears to reside in this subgenre. This wouldn’t be much of a problem if the majority of them were actually good. For every Charlie Huston who pumps out great, original vampire-noir fantasy, there are hundreds of authors writing essentially similar variations on the same idea: a super powered hero or heroine altruistically fighting for humanity against the things that go bump in the night. This gives many of these novels a “me-too” feeling, as if they are all being written to capitalize on the popularity of the market and not to tell an interesting story.
Urban fantasy is essentially a Western for a new generation, filled with horrible hell spawned monsters instead of gunslingers and outlaws. The hero, like the cowboy of old, is a loner who stands tall against overwhelming evil forces, surviving only by his smarts and resourcefulness. (Just once I’d like to see a hero survive from pure dumb luck, and have a whole slew of Myspace friends to boot!) Well, the newest novel to grab this template and start happily frolicking down the urban fantasy path is Lilith Saintcrow’s “Night Shift”.
Saintcrow takes a big narrative chunk out of “Buffy the Vampire Slayer” for “Night Shift”. Jill Kismet is a specially-trained, super powered hunter who tracks down and slays demons or Hellbreed. She’s basically a Buffy for demons, as she’s all that stands between us and the demons that go bump in the corridors of Hell. Jill doesn’t hunt demons on the sly though, as the police are well aware of both her existence and the existence of the Hellbreed, and employ her frequently as a consultant. So when an unusual case pops up, it isn’t long before Jill gets a call from the local precinct.
One of these calls for Jill is for the grisly murder of five cops, their bodies torn apart and mutilated. The fatal wounds puzzle her though, as they appear to have been inflicted by a Hellbreed and Were (a human that transforms in an animal form) working together. This seems impossible since Hellbreeds and Weres are mortal enemies. Showing up on the case soon after are Jill’s two friends, Harper and Dominic, who happen to be FBI agents, and more surprisingly, Weres. Coincidentally, Harper and Dominic have been tracking the murderous Were along with Saul Dustcircle, another Were whose sister was murdered by the rogue beast. Jill and her friends set off to solve the mystery of the rogue Were and why it’s working with a Hellbreed. This leads Jill deeper and deeper into dangerous waters where she must use everything in her power to survive. But what will Jill have to sacrifice to bring the murderers to justice?
The story is thin and uninspired with slow pacing that is used to artificially elongate the novel. There really isn’t much story here as the hunt for the murderers is quite straightforward and lacks any interesting twists or turns. Until the ending, Jill’s multiple confrontations with the villains end with her catching a significant beating and then losing them in the process. Saintcrow tries for a hard-edged, gritty tone in the material and characters, which is fairly successful, though Jill is whinier than tough and street-wise. The descriptions are repetitive; there are a slew of passages describing the blood and sweat caked on her and her clothes as well as the tingling of her scar. For some reason, Saintcrow seems obsessed with the crackling of caked blood.
Last Word:
There wasn’t much in “Night Shift” to grab my interest, and by the end, I was just waiting for the book to end. The story was just too mundane and predictable with a weak conclusion that only offered a meager payoff. Lilith Saintcrow has unfortunately failed to elevate it above the teeming masses of “me-too” urban fantasy out there. Overall, “Night Shift” is disappointedly mediocre.
3 comments:
Thanks for saving me the hours on that book. I'll move on to something that you highly recommend on other reviews. Thanks again for sparing us all the misery of a slow, monotonous read!! You took a bullet for us all.
Oh, the police again. I am suddenly not so interested. But I have to tell you that Buffy hunted demons as well. Although most were actually vampires.
I hate when characters have to work with the cops and when heroines are whiny.
PS: Great blog! I added you on my blog roll.
Great review. I read the first book of Lilith Saintcrow's Dante Valentine series and was unimpressed, but I was thinking about giving this a try. Mmm, I'll stay away now, thanks for the heads up.
(And in the Dante Valentine books there was a whole lot of "crackling" of blood and magic going on as well. Heh.)
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