Wednesday, August 6, 2014

Carry On My Wayward Son...

Nightlife
by Rob Thurman
p. 2006




PSA: I tried staying mostly spoiler free because I hope this review attracts new readers and I don't want to ruin anything, but I couldn't resist completely. Highlight the black-barred text if you want to read my 'spoilered' section, which includes spoilers for both Nightlife and the television series, "Supernatural"





My first reread of the year, Nightlife is the first in an urban sci-fi/fantasy series written by Rob Thurman and released just eight years ago. I had picked it up about the same time and read through it in a couple of days and I was hooked. I had impatiently waited for the release of the following two books, then got a bit behind and stopped reading (though I didn’t stop collecting, as I always knew I’d pick it up again). It’s been years since I’ve been submerged in Thurman’s world; there are now eight novels in the series, each released a year apart, and I intend to have them all read by the end of 2014... so I can impatiently await the ninth book, I guess. At least Thurman’s been busier in recent years, releasing novels in different series, so I have something else to sate my thirst.


I have some complicated thoughts on Rob Thurman. For starters, I feel a small sense of victory that I was able to correctly guess that Thurman was female. Robyn Thurman purposefully left her gender ambiguous for the first few novel releases. I had to seek out her Livejournal (remember, this was 2006) before I could confirm what I’d guessed simply by her style of writing.


Speaking of her style, I both love and hate Rob Thurman... because I feel her style is exactly what mine would be like if I could just finish something. I instantly declared a silent allegiance to Thurman as an author because I was so impressed by her introspective, emotional representation of her well-drawn characters. It just falls so perfectly in line with my interests: urban fantasy, character-driven, intense and angsty, focuses on brothers, lots of dialogue, very sarcastic characters. It is because of these qualities that I first had the inkling that Thurman was secretly female. It could just be that I identified with her and projected my own gender onto her, but against all evidence to the contrary, I happened to be right, so maybe there is something to that.


There is probably also something to the fact that I love/hate her because not only has she written a story so disturbingly similar to my style and interests, but she has written many of them before I can even finish one. It’s a minor thing, of course, and any jealousy I have vanishes the moment I get sucked in to one of her books.


Let’s talk briefly about the plot: the series in question is loosely referred to as the Cal Leandros series, because that is the protagonist they have in common. Cal, short for Caliban—a cruel name bestowed on him by an uncaring mother who has deemed him a monster—is a 19-year-old half human, half demon living off the radar in New York City with only his older (fully human) brother Niko for company. Cal and Niko have been running for their lives for the past three years from Cal’s demon ‘family,’ the Auphe, hideously pasty, elven demons from another time. They’ve been banished to a hellish dimension, their numbers dwindling, ever since the induction of the human race, and they have plans for Cal to help them regain power. They kidnapped him once before—an experience that has been erased from Cal’s memory—and Niko is there to make sure it never happens again.


Nightlife is in every way an origin story. There are three supporting characters in Niko and Cal’s circle and their roles are pretty efficiently established in Nightlife. Of the three, Robin Goodfellow is clearly designed to be a fan favorite. Not only does he share his name with the author, but he gets some of the best dialogue in a story already rich with sarcastic quips and one-liners. Goodfellow is a puck, the mythical goat-man (less a pair of goat legs, a depiction Goodfellow dismisses as a poor fashion statement), and he is almost as old as the Auphe. These days he masquerades as a car salesman... until Cal and Niko come along and upend his comfortable—if lonely—existence.


I’m a little disappointed with the depiction of the two female characters, Promise, a vampire with a similar temperament as and a thing for Niko, and George, a syrupy sweet teenage psychic who clings to her notions about Cal despite the latter’s valiant attempts to push her away. Both characters are likeable, no doubt about it, but they aren’t really relatable or particularly complicated yet. They are too idealized, designed to be the perfect soulmates for Niko and Cal without really developing as individuals first. I hope this changes in later books; there’s still time, though from my memory, this doesn’t change in the first three books.


My only other complaint is that, for a first novel, Thurman’s characters are perhaps a little too well-defined. The reader can get a sense of them after the first hundred pages, and the characters themselves always know how the others are going to react. It’s comforting to know that Thurman knows her characters like the back of her hand, but it leaves little room for them to surprise you, even this early on.


That said, I liked this novel even more the second time around and my reread has sufficiently energized me to continue the series. Maybe not all at once, but before the end of the year, for sure. There are definite shades of one of my favorite television shows, “Supernatural,” in these books; even the author has admitted this after checking out the CW program, which started roughly a year before Nightlife’s release. Two adult brothers fighting monsters for a living, always on the run, one older and overprotective, the younger troubled and with shades of demonic influence to him. Hell, even the little details are strikingly similar: mom meets a fiery end at the hand of ‘demons,’ little brother takes a fatal knife to the gut and is brought back by supernatural means, and both Cal and Sam’s demonic heritage was orchestrated by the bad guys in order to use both young men as a gateway between worlds. I guess this makes Robin Goodfellow their ‘Castiel’... except a complete 180 in disposition. Where Castiel can be no-nonsense, asexual, naive, Goodfellow is a hedonistic, vainglorious pit of sarcasm. It’s an interesting contrast, though not as interesting as the difference in brotherly relationships. One thing I find refreshing about Thurman’s series over "Supernatural" (a TV show I’ve loved and hated over the years) is that Cal and Niko have a refreshingly honest relationship. They don’t spend the books constantly bickering and being emotionally stunted like Sam and Dean Winchester. I only hope the books retain this dynamic going forward.

I could say a lot more about my likes and dislikes in Nightlife, but I have seven more reviews ahead of me, and I'm sure I'll have a lot more to say, so I'll leave it for now.

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