The Urban Fantasy Critic: Forever

So this season of fall tv looks like it’s going to be a wondrous one for nerds and geeks everywhere. We’ve got several DC properties with Arrow and Flash, soon to be followed with Gotham and perhaps even a Teen Titans. We’ve got the return of Sleepy Hollow, which I have to say was a smash success for me, even with its Christian theme. We’re even getting one of the OG urban fantasy stories out there with Constantine.

And then we apparently are getting Forever.

Now, with only one episode out its impossible to tell if this show actually has anything Magical to it. Though with the main character, Dr. Henry Morgan, constantly returning to life via unexplained means…I’m going with “a wizard did it” until proven otherwise. So, at least for now, another urban fantasy show out there for me.

The basic plot of the show is that Dr. Morgan can’t die, and since he started out as a doctor he’s run with it during his immortality. Nearly two hundred years of life and counting has turned him into a veritable Sherlock Holmes with details. Which, really, gives us the best description of this show. Sherlock Holmes meets Highlander.

I honestly wish I could do this one as a video review, but the writing bug has bitten me and away I must write. While I don’t know that I will give this show all that many points for original concept (I’m sure the idea has been done in fanfictions somewhere). I will point to it as at least a pleasing concept. Immortals are fun, history is fun, and having an excuse to have stories pop back in history is something I loved about the Highlander TV series. In fact, it something I’ve missed with tv shows as of the last decade or so. I think it’s one of the things I liked about Sleepy Hollow so much. Forever‘s first episode didn’t have quite the political commentary that SH does in it’s show. Though, that is understandable since Dr. Morgan has lived through time and seen the events that led up to the present, where as Ichabod Crane is doing the fish out of water and has the preserved ideals of the America’s during the Revolution.

However, just because I’ve drawn those two shows together doesn’t mean they are alike. Forever looks to be very much more a fun who-done-it series with a dry sense of humor. It’s almost British, actually. I could see this show on the BBC, with its dry, spartan whit. Meanwhile, Sleepy Hollow gives us the things we like in our urban fantasy: dark themes, strange creatures, and masterly evil plans. Forever does look like it is going to have a master plot of immortals, but not to the same degree or nearly as dark, judging by the first episode.

And that’s wonderful. I like dark shows, I like epic shows, I like shows with complicated plots and twists. But occasionally, you just need a fun show.

Forever looks to be that fun show that’s needed this year. Dr. Morgan is instantly engaging to me, the detective lady looks a bit…typical, but I’m sure character development will help her grow. Dr. Morgan’s son looks to add the levity needed against an immortals pathos. And the mysteries…we’ll see how engaging they are, how much history plays into them, and if the crimes take a more historic bent due to his immortality. All in all though, I say check it out, this could be one of the years best shows.

The Urban Fantasy Critic: Horns by Joe Hill

Hello and welcome to the first issue of the Urban Fantasy Critic, where I focus on reviewing those stories that fall in the realms of Urban Fantasy. This was actually the first style of reviews I conceived of after too many hours of watching the Nostalgia Critic. Most of these are going to be video reviews, but experiments showed me that novels are very hard for me to put to video, so for now they will be text, with other media going on video.

One of the benefits of being employed in a book store is you always run across interesting books. It’s even better when you can get bargain books at a discount. Which is where I found Horns by Joe Hill.

Blessed shall you be when you go in.

A bit of background from what I’ve picked up. According to das wiki this is Hill’s second published novel and according to coworkers he’s actually the son of Stephen King. Which, once I saw a picture of him, became rather obvious. Certainly, if this book is to judge compared to his father’s works that I’ve read, Joe surpasses the King in talent and imagination.

The basic story is that the main character, Ig Perrish, long maligned for raping and murdering his girlfriend, awakes one morning with no memory of the night before to a pair of horns growing out of his head and a rapidly growing set of demonic powers. The first of which is people confess their darkest secrets to him without a thought with no memory of doing so. It doesn’t take long for this to quickly lead him down the path of finding out who killed the love of his life Merrin Williams and planning his vengeance. Along the way he learns a little about God, a bit more about the Devil, and more about those around him than he ever wanted to know.

He also gets a lot of pet snakes and a pitchfork.

Urban fantasy has been around as an acknowledged genre since the 80’s and in nearly thirty years its a lot harder to come up with original idea for the genre than back when it first started. I can’t say that Horns is all that original in concept, certainly the revenge plot has been around since the first human stories, and a man turning into a devil has probably been around for as long as Christianity has existed. Even the powers he gains aren’t anything overly original, in fact they’re so tried and true for the devil they almost become stereotypical.

In the hands of a lesser writer, such would have become very, very dull.

And yet…

The powers work because reading the book you can sense they weren’t chosen because “these are the traditional powers of a demon” out of laziness. It feels as if they were chosen from an incredible amount of research. Ig doesn’t get a lot of powers, and they aren’t overly powerful, but each one flows out of him as if from a natural source. “I am the devil,” they say, rather than the all to common scream of “I AM THE DEVIL, WORSHIP ME!!!” that happens when people give their characters demonic origins. A statement of fact, rather than a declaration of power, if you will.

I think what really sold me on this book though is that, like the powers, the plot flows with serpentine grace, weaving and sliding around you. It doesn’t slap you in the face, but it doesn’t hide it from you either. As the murder mystery goes, it almost pulls a Columbo and tells you right at the beginning who actually killed Merrin. At first I thought it was joking, a red herring meant to distract you from the real killer. A friend said he’d put money down on the killer being Ig. I need to see if he was serious about that.

But no, that person really is the killer. The book then flows from past to future and back again a few times. Since I started reading the book hoping for a rather basic “man gets demon powers and goes on roaring rampage of revenge” this initially annoyed me. I didn’t care about how Ig and Marrin had met, or grown to love each other. I wanted a demon to go killing people. I didn’t get that.

I don’t care though. Even though I was annoyed by the flash backs, they built the story. Not only did they build the story, the things inside them became important plot points to explain not only why Merrin left Ig, what happened to her the night she died, and why the killer did it, but how Ig got his powers and from who. If forced me to care about them by the end, it made me understand each one and their movements the same way that Ig’s powers forced him to understand everyone around him and why they committed the actions that they did.

It gave me Ig’s powers. It made me into a devil.

It wasn’t all doom and gloom however. The romance was touching, and the references were so numerous and music based that I didn’t catch them all, and had to look up the ones I thought I had. Devil in a blue dress still has me laughing and I hope that part gets into the movie.

Because there is going to be a movie! With Daniel Radcliffe no less.

 

In fact, the trailer is what made me seriously read the book. While I enjoyed the Harry Potter movies (and may do a review of them later on in an UF context) Daniel Radcliffe didn’t exactly overwhelm me. He didn’t underwhelm me either, to be fair, he made a very convincing Harry Potter and I enjoyed his work. But it wasn’t spectacular, if you will. In the short trailer for Horns though…dear gods, that man can act. Hopefully the movie is as good as the trailer. The book certainly lived up to expectations from it.

As far as urban fantasy aspects go, I can’t say if falls too heavily into the spectrum. Ig is the only non-human apparent in the story and doesn’t run into any other supernatural creatures. Well, he does run into Satan’s tree-house, but that’ it. Literally. But saturation isn’t what makes an Urban Fantasy. Dracula, the original Urban Fantasy novel, only had the vampire Dracula (and his brides) to add the supernatural element. Yet Dracula is really the story I credit with the creation of Urban Fantasy as a genre, even if it wouldn’t be recognized as such for an age. And like Dracula, more of the supernatural wasn’t needed to make this an amazing story of the supernatural.

In all I would have to say I rate this book a solid 9/10. The characters are engaging, the prose is wonderful, and the plot manages to make its simplicity into a thing of beauty, like the movements of a taichi master. Go give it a read.

I’m going to be going to try out these demonic powers to get people’s secrets a spin. 😉

Amen.

Blessed shall you be when you go out.