Bad Moon Rising

Moonshine
by Rob Thurman
p. 2007


Word of warning: this review is pretty much 50% spoilers, more for the purposes of discussing if you've already read the book than for pre-reading reviews. Therefore I have not spoiler-barred anything here. If you want a more spoiler-free version, check out my review of Nightlife.

Fresh on the heels of Nightlife, I dove right into its immediate sequel, Moonshine, which takes place some weeks after its predecessor. Cal and Niko have moved on from the Auphe business and are now working as supernatural pest control, essentially supernatural guns for hire. The horrors of the trade are the least of their worries though, when they take a job from the werewolf underworld and Cal’s psychic not-quite-paramour, George, is abducted.

The plot of Moonshine is much more twisty and convoluted than Nightlife, as there are a lot more players involved in the game. It is certainly not short on action, as the book is just a series of encounters with various deadly creatures, some directly involved in the main plot, some not so much.

I’ll speak briefly about the Auphe first. The start of the book gives you the impression that they have been wiped out and no longer pose a threat. Of course, we find out halfway through that this is not true, when a surviving Auphe steps in to derail Cal’s rescue attempts. I actually think it might have been cool if Cal and Niko actually had definitively defeated the Auphe at the end of Nightlife; it would have been unexpected, to say the least, but Moonshine makes it clear that the Auphe are here to stay and will remain the primary protagonists of the series, though for now their efforts seem to be afforded more towards personally fucking up Cal’s life than they are towards world domination. The important thing to learn from the reappearance of the Auphe, though, is that Cal seems to have picked up some of their habits—not so much with the bad ones, like murder and destruction, but the ambiguous ones, like opening portals to travel through. It’s a neat little superpower that will make things quite interesting if Cal A) learns to control it and B) stops agonizing over his Auphe genes and just accepts it as a bonus.

Given Cal’s general attitude, the latter seems unlikely to happen, but the former is a distinct possibility. Indeed, Cal spends just a little bit too much of this book torturing himself over his demonic half and it gets a bit tedious, especially when it’s obvious that it’s being used a plot device to keep him and George apart. I would like to see Cal allow himself to be happy for once. Given the twist at the end of Moonshine (that George was targeted because of who she was, not because of Cal, and it was Cal’s presence in her life that saved her), I had hoped for an opening between the two adorable kids, but the Auphe’s personal mission to destroy Cal’s happiness had to rear its ugly head and make him turn the girl away at the door. This is literally the last scene in Moonshine, ending a bit abruptly and on a sour note. I almost hope the relationship is not revisited in every book, but that will only happen if George leaves town. I’m not entirely against this; as I’d mentioned before, I find George likeable, but admittedly dull and—after her hands off approach to her own fate, demonstrated in this novel—a little frustrating, to be perfectly honest. I’m not sure I’m interested in Cal getting involved with a partner who won’t learn to protect herself, especially when she knows how much evil is out there in her own proverbial backyard.

What little Goodfellow we had in Moonshine was still gold. I had been mostly indifferent to the puck my first time around, but I’m liking him a lot more at a second glance. He’s clearly a character with a lot of history, with a lot to be chipped away, and I’m looking forward to diving deeper into that in the future novels. Goodfellow’s backstory must not only be extensive and layered, but there’s plenty of room there for twists and turns, considering he’s literally been around since the dawn of humanity. His ability to adapt to any culture and still be himself interjects a lot of fun into the otherwise angst-ridden adventures of Cal and Niko. There is a Goodfellow-related thread left open in Moonshine revolving around a mysterious attack with a crossbow at the start of the novel, evidence that some of Thurman’s subplots will likely span multiple novels. This is kind of refreshing in retrospect, but when I was reading the books the first time around, it was highly frustrating. It’s easy to forget everything that happened when you have yearlong intervals between books, the main reason I allowed myself to fall so drastically behind.

Moonshine gives us a much wider look at the Cal Leandros universe, introducing us to plenty of creepy crawlies, complete with Thurman’s vivid descriptions. She has set up a New York rich with seedy underbelly possibilities and she doesn’t skimp on the brutality. The novel opens with a brutalized little girl, dead by the hands of one of these said creepy crawlies (and perhaps setting up a parallel for the later abduction of George, an innocent ‘girl’ in her own right), and it doesn’t spare us the raw hurt of the murder. It’s sad, no doubt, but Thurman affords the right amount of solemnity to the tragic death. If there’s one thing Thurman has nailed, it is the raw emotion of her characters, which she undoubtedly knows like the back of her hand.