REVIEWED BY WALTER ALBERT:         


JUSTIN GUSTAINIS – Hard Spell. Angry Robot, US, paperback original, July 2011; UK, ppbk, June 2011.

JUSTIN GUSTAINIS Hard Spell

   Hard Spell, “an Occult Crimes Unit Investigation” novel, and the first in a projected series, is set in Scranton, Pennsylvania. Scranton, like the rest of the country, has been learning to deal with the “supernatural element” for some fifty years in the wake of the infiltration of returning World War II troops from Europe by various supernatural beings.

   It’s not been an easy path and the dream of the day envisioned by Martin Luther King when “naturals and supernaturals” would live together in harmony is not yet realized.

   Detective Stan Markowski is a member of the Scranton “Supe Squad,” housed in the basement of Police Headquarters, and works with his long-time partner, Paul di Napoli, on the night shift (and the implied pun is probably intended).

   When di Napoli is killed by goblins in a negotiated situation that turns sour, he’s replaced by Karl Renfer, a “tall, gangly kid, all elbows and knees,” whose career came under a cloud after his former partner claimed he failed to come to his defense during a confrontation with a voodoo master raising corpses from the dead. Renfer was cleared by a Review Board, but Markowski is still wary of his younger, less experienced partner.

   Both detectives are put to the test by a series of murders related to an ancient book of necromancy, the “Opus Mago,” that will give the possessor the power to awaken one of the Great Ones, powerful entities who predate man and, if they are resurrected, could have the power to supplant him.

   Or, as the irreverent Renfer so colorfully puts it, the “Opus Mago” is a “recipe book for cooking up different kinds of Truly Bad Shit.”

   This alternative history crossover nimbly maneuvers a narrow path through the minefield of the conflicting demands of the police procedural and the apocalyptic horror novel in a promising debut for the fledgling series.

Editorial Comments:   A neat trailer for Hard Spell can be found here on YouTube. Number two in the series, Evil Dark, is on Angry Robot’s schedule for April 2012.

   If this kind of crossover fiction is your kind of thing, here’s an anthology that’s chock full of them: Those Who Fight Monsters: Tales of Occult Detectives, edited by Justin Gustainis (Edge, 2011). I’ll list the contents (and detectives) as the first comment. (Some of these I already knew about, others I didn’t.)