Radio Free Europe

 Signs and Wonders by Morgan Brice has our heroes heading into the National Radio Quiet Zone to take down the next witch disciple, one who happens to also be both a cult leader and running a compter based business that's laundering money for the other disciples. 

Along the way, we get Brent and Travis from one of her other series, plus a gay couple in WV who are looking to go to Pittsburgh for obvious reasons. That one of them is the current descendant complicates things. 

At any rate, anyone reading this who has read the rest of the series has an idea of the basic structure, although now that there are only 5 disciples left, Evan and Seth are discussing what to do with retirement. Even if Evan is constantly becoming the Daphne of the series, constantly getting himself in unnecessary danger. 

Fun read.

Da da devil is in da ta da tails

 Morgan Brice's new Witchbane novel, The Devil You Know, is actually a pretty good continuation of the story, even as it continues expanding the shared world she's building with all of her various and sundry series. 

Evan and Seth are in Cleveland looking for their next Witch Disciple, this time a drug dealing businessman who makes drugs for supernatural people. This time, Seth gets cursed (and kidnapped) with a spell that mentally connects him with his greatest desire, while Evan is stuck trying to navigate alliances with the Supernatural FBI to take down the next disciple. 

Seth's hallucinations are kind of painful to read, since his greatest desire is his family who died before the series started. It's rough reading about his relationship with his brother and parents, and it runs counterpoint to Evan's youngest brother who shows up in Cleveland and gets sucked in to the narrative. 

While everything does get resolved as one would expect in this series, dealing with things from both boys' past helps humanize them a lot more than what we've seen. Bonus points for Evan finally figuring out he's safe to not go back for a parental visit to retraumatize himself.  

Fun book.

Crossovers aren't normally this fun.

So, Unholy, pseudonymous Morgan Brice's new Witchbane entry crosses over into the authors other works in a big way, as Evan and Seth enter Charleston, South Carolina, and thereby enter the author Gail Z. Martin's other same world characters. Which gets interesting, since half the appeal of Witchbane is that the protagonists are fairly underpowered humans running around trying to stop fairly high powered temporarily immortal witch disciples, and the folks we meet in Charleston....aren't. On the other hand, we get around this major power level gap by having the main antagonist be someone working on a much more hidden level than what the crossover characters normally deal with, while doing things that eventually get them helping out in ways that don't detract from the actual hunt.

The set up for this one involves finding out that the Disciple in this one, Longstreet, traffics in relics and in human magical trafficking. However, we find out Longstreet has already made his sacrifice prior to Seth and Evan's arrival, which allows him to cause a car wreck involving the two, followed by a soon to be fatal curse that prevents them touching each other.

At which point Martin's characters come to the fore, helping stave off the effects of the curse, as well as helping speed up the research portion of figuring out where Longstreet is and what his amulet and reserve are. We get phone cameos from Brice's other series, as two of her other series protagonists phone in with psychic visions.

And we wind up with a satisfying ending that kind of helps point out the magical ivory tower verses the marginal magicians of the proletariat, and how a sneeze in one group hits the others.

It's a good entry, and I look forward to a point where the novella that covers what happens after this gets a physical copy.

Sam and Dean go to the Carolinas

So, ended up finishing Morgan Brice's Flame and Ash this afternoon, which would be the next book in the Witchbane series. We're again following Seth and Evan as they track down witch disciples, this time in Boone, North Carolina, and this time with Milo and Toby, Seth's mentors in the hunt.

They're roughly two years ahead of schedule, as the current victim to be, Steve, is known, as is the probable identity of the disciple, and Steve isn't due to become a victim for another two years. (This would also be the third disciple they've gone after, and the third who's victim is a gay man. I'm beginning to wonder if part of the curse is each victim enjoys the pleasures inherent in the touch between two men.)

Anyway, the chase is almost secondary, as much of the book is spent examining the parallels between the hunter couples, and everyone getting mirrors into their relationships, as well as a reflection on Seth's time in Iraq, as one of his platoon lives in Boone.

We also get a reversal on the boyfriend in jeopardy, as this time Seth gets in trouble instead of Evan. Which is good, since it gives us some much needed insight into the disciples and how they operate.

This isn't exactly undying fiction for the ages, but it does hold attention pretty well and remains fun to read, which beats undying literature to be sure.

Muddy Waters

So, in Morgan Brice's Dark Rivers, we follow Evan and Seth to that known hellhole, Pittsburgh. (At a guess, the next edition will be either Cleveland or Detroit. Witch disciples of the Rust Belt for the WIN!)

Anyway, the general plot is that they've discovered another disciple and descendant, this time living in the 3 Rivers. Said descendant, Brandon, works part time as an EMT and part time as a barista. His boyfriend, Alex, works as a PI, one who Seth happens to have hired. Oops.

Add into this Evan's evil ex, who's now working for the current disciple, and who kidnaps Evan about halfway through, uses Evan's phone to text a break up message to Seth (along with an old non consensual video of him and Evan from back in the day), and you have a whole mess of drama.

While the book was actually well written and a heck of a lot more compelling than much of what's currently being written in the MM Supernatural Romance genre, it doesn't change that this particular story is a straight line. Or that the confrontation that ends everything happens relatively early, leaving us several pages of Christmas good will and...well... stocking stuffing.

Mind you, there are other hunters running through the book, but I have no idea if they're from another of Brice's series or not. (If she's creating a shared universe, that's great. If not, give us someplace to track down what the other hunters are talking about. Actually, either way, show us what the heck the Ninja Priest and Government agent were doing prior to this.)

Fun read, if a bit light.

You and your words, obsessed with your legacy

I'm not sure if Morgan Brice's Burn counts as a book or not, since it clocks in at 100 pages and is listed as volume 1.5 on Goodreads. However, I own a copy and I finished it, so it's getting treated as one. (I know, technically, it's a novella, but....)

One of the original reviews of Brokeback Mountain I read summed it up as "90 minutes of angst, 1 minute of pleasure", neglecting to mention the 1 minute of pleasure happens roughly 15 minutes in. Burn is a bit like that, since we're picking up in the months following the events of Witchbane, as Seth and Evan try to find relationship balances in a fairly new romance that involves moving in together in Seth's RV. That Seth is trying to train Evan in the fine art of monster hunting and rote magicks doesn't help with this.

So, we follow Seth and Evan from Richmond to Centralia, through battles with a vengeful ghost, ghouls, zombies, and kobalds and a bunch of relationship drama and jealousies as Seth goes through the existential angst of how someone he loves would be better off with someone else and Evan thinks Seth isn't giving him enough credit for the things he can bring to the table.

This leads to both parties doing stupid things, and finally coming to terms in the end, along with a few shout outs to characters from other series, written under both Morgan Brice and Gail Z. Martin.

Honestly, I kind of liked this better than the first one, since it shows a less idealized version of boy meets boy, where boy and boy figure out sex only gets you so far when the rent's due, there's no food in the house, and someone ate the last Twinkie.

Talk about your fairy tales

So, on advice from an LGBTQ Horror group I'm in, I picked up the Witchbane series by Morgan Brice, and finished book 1 before work this morning.

I'm really unsure how to do this. It's not that I didn't enjoy reading it, and it's not that I didn't like it, it's just... Well, I get the sense this started like Fifty Shades of Gray, in that our two main characters are semi-analogous to Dean and Sam Winchester of Supernatural. We start with Jesse, who takes his younger brother Seth ghost hunting at the Gates of Hell, a local legend in Brazil, Indiana. Their goal is to make a YouTube ghost hunting video by doing it on Halloween. Seth ends up getting flayed alive, while Jesse gets knocked out and finds the body the next morning. He gets hospitalized, his parents die in a car crash.... Jesse is left with a motorcycle and a motor home.

Two years later, Jesee has linked up with a rather small conglomeration of monster hunters, with the goal of tracking down whomever killed his brother. The set up is something like a Warlock got lynched on Halloween, and now his immortalish disciples sacrifice a descendant of each of the 12 deputies on a twelve year cycle. Seems different disciples are on different cycles, so we start with the Disciple getting ready to sacrifice Evan.

Evan currently lives in Richmond, Virginia, having left home in Oklahoma following expulsion from his church and family for fooling around with a high school athlete. Evan works as a bartender, and has his breath taken away when Jesse walks into his bar. Jesse, for his part, is infatuated with Evan at first sight, even as he doesn't realize Evan is Evan, as he works under the name Sonny. They go on a date, which ends quickly as Evan gets called back in to the bar.

The next night, they try again, wind up back at Evan's apartment, and things happen. Followed by waking up to people breaking in with guns, which is when Jesse finds out his hook up is also the man he's been looking for in a non sexual fashion. Evan's bar burns down, his apartment catches fire, so Evan is stuck living with Jesse, only half believing Jesse's story.

What follows is a dual game of cat and mouse, as the immortal Disciple stalks Evan as Jesse tries to track down said disciple. Eventually, everyone but the disciple and his minions get a happy ending, often in more ways than one.

Now, much as I enjoyed the read, the main narrative spans roughly 48 hours. In that 48 hours, Jesse and Evan explore the Mother's Gift of Pleasure roughly (and I do mean roughly) 9 times, a few occasions getting a refraction period of around 15-20 seconds. While the smut is better written and and more of interest to me than anything Laurell K. Hamilton has written in the past 15 years, it's also really hard to read it when one part of your brain is pointing out that neither man would be able to stalk immortal disciples after wearing themselves out that much. Nor does male anatomy usually allow that short of a refraction period.  Also, given both men have emotional issues with trust, they certainly do seem to forget them with each other quickly.

Honestly, it's fun reading, just remember to put actual biology and psychology out of mind while you read it as a fairy tale.