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A review by fyoosha
The Demonists by Thomas E. Sniegoski
2.0
The main reason I hated this book was the writing.
God, the writing.
It was just. So very bad. So melodramatic, clunky, awkward. It literally made me cringe every single page. It took away from and affected everything: dialogue, pacing, characters. It rendered the dialogue wooden and unrealistic, made the pacing come to a screeching halt even during tense scenes, and caused the characters to be one-dimensional paper cut outs.
Seriously, the dialogue here may have been more fitting in a particularly highfalutin epic fantasy novel that was trying hard to sound ~old timey~ but in a modern urban fantasy it just ripped me out of the story each time. The characters were all so, so bland. There's John, the main character, who's just your generic Straight White Everyman with zero - and I mean ZERO - personality except for how much he ~loves~ his wife, whom he always refers to as his ~love~ like we're in some kind of 1960s soap opera (and yeah, I could tell from the prologue that this book was written by a straight man, and sadly this became more obvious as the book continued - like, why does he comment on her sexy laugh and her sexy smile at the most random and inappropriate times?).
Said wife, Theo, is similarly bland, though thankfully much less melodramatic, and she spends the majority of the book possessed and having horrific things happen to her body (I'll give points for some great body horror though). Brenna, an FBI agent, is Tough and Strong but she's a woman so of course her backstory is that she's a grieving mother who lost her baby (why???????). There are some other characters whose names I can't even remember, because they all blended together into an amorphous mass with no personality.
The reason I kept going with this book is because I found myself actually interested in the plot. This plot is the stuff of my dreams! Demons! Possessions! Ancient entities being brought back to the world! Extreme gore and violence! B-movie horror sequences complete with projectile vomit! Cosmic horror! Secret organizations! I love this stuff! But it was all dragged down by the terrible writing and characters. What's more, even though I love this kind of plot, it's not exactly original, but that wouldn't matter if an author came at it from a unique angle. But sadly nothing about this book was unique or fresh or original in any way, shape, or form.
God, the writing.
It was just. So very bad. So melodramatic, clunky, awkward. It literally made me cringe every single page. It took away from and affected everything: dialogue, pacing, characters. It rendered the dialogue wooden and unrealistic, made the pacing come to a screeching halt even during tense scenes, and caused the characters to be one-dimensional paper cut outs.
Seriously, the dialogue here may have been more fitting in a particularly highfalutin epic fantasy novel that was trying hard to sound ~old timey~ but in a modern urban fantasy it just ripped me out of the story each time. The characters were all so, so bland. There's John, the main character, who's just your generic Straight White Everyman with zero - and I mean ZERO - personality except for how much he ~loves~ his wife, whom he always refers to as his ~love~ like we're in some kind of 1960s soap opera (and yeah, I could tell from the prologue that this book was written by a straight man, and sadly this became more obvious as the book continued - like, why does he comment on her sexy laugh and her sexy smile at the most random and inappropriate times?).
Said wife, Theo, is similarly bland, though thankfully much less melodramatic, and she spends the majority of the book possessed and having horrific things happen to her body (I'll give points for some great body horror though). Brenna, an FBI agent, is Tough and Strong but she's a woman so of course her backstory is that she's a grieving mother who lost her baby (why???????). There are some other characters whose names I can't even remember, because they all blended together into an amorphous mass with no personality.
The reason I kept going with this book is because I found myself actually interested in the plot. This plot is the stuff of my dreams! Demons! Possessions! Ancient entities being brought back to the world! Extreme gore and violence! B-movie horror sequences complete with projectile vomit! Cosmic horror! Secret organizations! I love this stuff! But it was all dragged down by the terrible writing and characters. What's more, even though I love this kind of plot, it's not exactly original, but that wouldn't matter if an author came at it from a unique angle. But sadly nothing about this book was unique or fresh or original in any way, shape, or form.