Back at Boskone, I went to a panel consisting of a number of revieweres recommending books that we might not have heard of. Toward the end, one of the panelists rattled off a list of authors writing urban fantasy (what he described as “Laurel Hamilton without all the porn”), and Rob Thurman was on the list. A couple of weeks ago, I was in Borders buying books, inclusing Jim Butcher’s Proven Guilty (which I read out of the library when it came out in hardcover). Since I was buying that, I decided to look for something else in the Dresden Files vein, and picked up Nightlife, thinking that it might scratch the same basic itch.
I probably just should’ve re-read the Butcher, because this was pretty much crap. It’s the story of Caliban Leandros and his half-brother Niko, who are in New York hiding from Caliban’s father, who was an elf. Only in this world, that doesn’t have the connotation of pointy-eared glamor that you usually get– the Auphes are monstrous creatures (Cal and Niko refer to them as “Grendels”) who hate and fear humans, and conceived Cal (paying his white-trash mother to couple with one of them) as part of a scheme to wipe humanity out. Cal escaped from them, and he and Niko have been on the run ever since.
The set-up sounds like trashy fun, but there are two major problems with the book:
The first problem is that Cal as narrator rarely goes more than two pages without indulging in a little self-loathing, constantly harping on the fact that he’s half monster. This gets tiresome fast– I was sick of it about twenty pages in. It’s bad enough that things actually improve when Cal gets possessed by an evil spirit late in the book. Yeah, it’s evil, and cartoonishly so, but at least it has some self-confidence.
The second problem is that Niko is just too good. Ninja assassins cower in awe of his stealth and fighting prowess, women and some men swoon at his good looks, scholars are daunted by his intellect, etc. He’s not quite a male Mary Sue, but it’s got a little of that feel.
It’s kind of a shame, really, because the setting is sort of interesting, and there are a few good setpieces. The trash kind of outweighs the fun, though, and it ends up reading a little like fanfic set in the world of a better novel.