I’ve read a couple yawners lately, so I needed something GOOD. I needed a dose of Felix Castor!
I know Harry Dresden is beloved around here, but I’ve never really been a fan. I MUCH prefer Felix. He’s an exorcist in London. He works with the police occasionally, getting in touch with the recently deceased, and otherwise acting like a private investigator for clients with ghost trouble. He’s a conflicted atheist exorcist, though, which means he doesn’t actually like performing exorcisms, since he doesn’t know what happens to those souls once they’re gone.
Felix has a lot going on. His best friend Rafi is in a psychiatric hospital specializing in people with supernatural/magical maladies, because he’s inhabited by a VERY pissed off demon, Asmodeus. His roommate Pen is a sometime witch, and the ex-girlfriend of Rafi. His protégé and occasional partner Juliet is a succubus, learning to fit in with humans and avoiding going back to hell.
Felix gets hired by a pair of bereaved parents who say their (dead) daughter has been kidnapped, and they want him to find her ghost. Juliet wants his help dealing with a church that appears to be haunted, turning its parishioners homicidal. The hospital no longer wants to house Rafi, as Asmodeus is getting more difficult to handle. A fellow exorcist is trying to beat him up, and a couple of were-minions are trying to kill him, for reasons unknown.
The characters are terrific, the writing is awesome, the story comes together so fantastically that I gasped out loud and immediately had to re-read the two pages where it all implodes. This is actually the second book in this series, but it’s the first one I read and it remains my favorite.
Mike Carey is the same M.R. Carey who wrote the fantabulous The Girl with All the Gifts, and also a bunch of graphic novels. He’s excellent, and apparently also writes under another name with his wife, but I haven’t been able to track those down. Recommended!
See, I like Felix, but I could never get over how much the Carey books just felt like him writing John Constantine with a different name. With the three Felix Castor books I did read, I kept waiting for them to become something MORE, which to be fair, it took the Dresden Files books 4-5 books to do, but they never became anything that I actively wanted to seek out and looked forward to, they were just perfectly ok reads.
Now if the books focused on Juliet, on the other hand, I suspect I would have had a very different emotional reaction to them. I loved her from the start.
Ooh, I’ve never read his Constantine run, but I can totally see that. Constantine and Castor and Dresden are definitely a ‘type.’ Juliet does get more of a starring role in a later book, though. She is awesome.