Ratings17
Average rating3.6
I was so excited about this and now I'm incredibly disappointed.
The world is a place with all sorts of magical creatures, but then suddenly magic disappears and so everyone is struggling. Except humans, who are becoming more and more dominant as a species when before they were the lowest of low. Fetch is a detective in Sunder City, where recently both an old vampire and a young sired disappeared.
On paper this sounds like a good read and something fun I would enjoy, but the painful one-sided nature of the story bothers me more than I can say, along with the attitude of the protagonist.
So here is the thing. This won't be a spoiler because they keep repeating this from like page 10, but basically magic didn't disappear because of some happenstance, but because humans were jealous of everyone else and wanted to steal magic, damaging the source of it in the process. Because humans are assholes. The shittest of all creatures, but also fuck them for wanting to change that. It's evil to dislike that they are looked down on, it's evil when they want to change it and it's even evil when they form isolated cities when they can live by their own rules without treated like scum.
Fetch keeps repeating these things. No matter what human do, they are the bad guys. No matter what they try to make a place for themselves, fuck humans. The funny thing? Fetch is human. The One Good Human, look at him, he HATES himself ans is ashamed of being human as he also keeps saying. So he must be a good guy, right? Because he hates himself! That's the only good way.
Every human character is an asshole, except wonderful, self-hating, self-pitying Fetch, who drinks to deal with the fact he is the same species as those nasty, disgusting humans.
Man, is this tiresome, the whole phenomena of virtue signalling through hating your own people and loudly declaring that you all are shit. Yes, I find it pathetic and stupid in real life (hello, Twitter, look at me being a good INSERT IDENTITY HERE unlike all the others). Why would I read this?
I don't even care about the mystery when the character and his thoughts annoy me so damn much. I quit it halfway in because I won't torture myself. Nah.
The prose is extremely weird as well. Most of the time it's straight forward gritty crime writing style, which is fine, but then these random, weird things are thrown in about the devil smiling in the moonlight and such. Why? It all feels like it happens without a reason, just to sound cool.