Thicker Than Water by Mike Carey
Oct. 27th, 2015 02:36 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
chuckro“You learn the basics, you have a horrifying experience in a graveyard, they give you a trenchcoat and steal your razor. It’s like an assembly line, really.” ~Ambrose Bierce in “Stanley and His Monster” by Phil Foglio.
Mike Carey had a lot of leftover ideas from his run on Hellblazer, so he created Felix Castor and used them all. This is the third book in the series, but it covers everything you might have missed and stands pretty well on its own.
I should have guessed given the circumstances, but this is less a horror book and much more a supernatural whodunit. It’s the kind of mystery story where, in retrospect, all the pieces are given to the reader ahead of time and you can figure out the twist if you piece them together before they’re explicitly spelled out to you. (Of course, I actually started reading this something like nine months ago, and periodically got through another chunk of it between reading various other books. So I had forgotten important clues by the time they became relevant again.) Which is not to say that terrible things don’t happen, but it’s pretty much a given that Fix will solve the mystery and save the day at the end.
But because Fix is basically Constantine, that won’t happen without a bunch of sacrifices, bad choices, and some damage to people close to him. Which, I think, is what tends to keep the character from falling into Mary Sue territory—he screws up, people suffer, his saves are always clever but never neat, and there’s the constant understanding that if not for the grace of Lady Luck, he’d be a corpse instead of a protagonist.
(I have to admit, I did really like that part of the resolution hinged on a bit of worldbuilding regarding demons that was almost explicitly spelled out but given no emphasis whatsoever, because Fix didn’t realize it was important.)
Overall: Did you like Carey’s run on Hellblazer? If you did, you’ll like this. If you didn’t…well, this is more of that, just as prose and with the serial numbers filed off.
Mike Carey had a lot of leftover ideas from his run on Hellblazer, so he created Felix Castor and used them all. This is the third book in the series, but it covers everything you might have missed and stands pretty well on its own.
I should have guessed given the circumstances, but this is less a horror book and much more a supernatural whodunit. It’s the kind of mystery story where, in retrospect, all the pieces are given to the reader ahead of time and you can figure out the twist if you piece them together before they’re explicitly spelled out to you. (Of course, I actually started reading this something like nine months ago, and periodically got through another chunk of it between reading various other books. So I had forgotten important clues by the time they became relevant again.) Which is not to say that terrible things don’t happen, but it’s pretty much a given that Fix will solve the mystery and save the day at the end.
But because Fix is basically Constantine, that won’t happen without a bunch of sacrifices, bad choices, and some damage to people close to him. Which, I think, is what tends to keep the character from falling into Mary Sue territory—he screws up, people suffer, his saves are always clever but never neat, and there’s the constant understanding that if not for the grace of Lady Luck, he’d be a corpse instead of a protagonist.
(I have to admit, I did really like that part of the resolution hinged on a bit of worldbuilding regarding demons that was almost explicitly spelled out but given no emphasis whatsoever, because Fix didn’t realize it was important.)
Overall: Did you like Carey’s run on Hellblazer? If you did, you’ll like this. If you didn’t…well, this is more of that, just as prose and with the serial numbers filed off.
