Vivia is a Hag, born with the ability to die and pass
into the underworld (not very magical) and come back (most certainly magical).
It has also gifted her with an ancient and, thankfully, absent mother and a
sadly harmed sister who she now has to look after
She works for a charity her step father dubs “citizens
advice for the supernatural” which is accurate – everyone needs help navigating
the legal and bureaucratic mazes of
Britain, the hated supernaturals are definitely no exception.
Then one of her colleagues becomes a zombie – and goes on
the run. A zombie apocalypse is terrifying enough to lock down the city and
Vivia steps up to find her co-worker and his son, going places where the police
(and past antipathy with the supernatural) cannot; and uncovering secrets that
have been buried a long time.
The first thing I have to praise about this book is the
world – an alternate magical London with all kinds of monsters and magic
lurking around the corners. But it’s not just a magical London, it’s not just a
magical London with overt supernatural; but a London with a MUNDANE
supernatural.
This is a London where our protagonist, a Hag, has to take the tube. This is a London where shapeshifters sue for housing discrimination and trolls have to fill out unemployment forms. This is a supernatural London with a department in charge of cleaning up magical leakages. This is a London that deals with zombie outbreaks with police and special forces and lockdowns (which people ignore, of course) and where the zombie virus can be caught as an STD.
It’s a world where the supernatural is part of the
mundane, in part if is gritty simply because of the mundanity of it. Not because
it’s super grim dark – but because it’s every bit as grim as our reality is –
and that’s “grim” not “grimdark”. It isn’t hyper awful with film noir-esque
monologues about how terrible everyone is – it’s grim in the sense that the
every day can be grim. The grind of daily life, of working a thankless job for
an underfunded charity protecting the rights of a much despised group. It’s not
easy, there are difficult decisions to be made – and it’s all so very mundane.
And when you can make werehamsters, people with wings and a weresnake orphanage mundane, that takes some extremely good writing.
The magical world is also, as can be guessed, unusual.
Shapeshifters come in all kinds of shapes and sizes for all kinds of creatures.
We have weresnakes where their snake form is based on the cultural
consciousness of the area (so in England largely cobras and giant pythons
because that is what we picture when we think “snake”). We have a variety of
ghosts in their various afterlives – it’s a really fascinating underworld with
some truly excellent concepts – like the ghost who eats constantly in their
afterlife because they were starved to death and they’re desperately trying to
deal with the trauma of that death. It’s just one element of interesting
complexity this world often hints towards – like the ethical conflict over what
to do with the zombies; without human flesh they degenerate and rot, a terrible
fate. But their bite spreads zombiedom – hence zombie apocalypse and the utter
terror . At one time zombies were burned to death which sounds horrific but is
also seen as preferable to the rotting alternative – leading to the fascinating
conflict of crematoria staff being arrested for burning zombies – when the
zombies themselves have sought them out. There’s a lot of conflict around
zombies because they are an apocalyptic force – but they’re also victims with
lots of difficult moments like family members being subject to arrest for
hiding the fact a relative is a zombie.
