Never trust fairy tales. Any story that ends with “They all lived happily ever after” is a crock. There are no happy endings. No endings, full stop. Life goes on. There’s always something new around the corner. You can overcome major obstacles, face great danger, look evil in the eye, and live to tell the tale — but that’s not the end. Life sweeps you forward, swings you around, bruises and batters you, drops some new drama or tragedy in your lap, never lets go until you get to the one true end — death. As long as you’re breathing, your story’s still going.
Life is shallow. It’s meaningless. Life passes and is forgotten within minutes. But movies endure. A film outlives everyone involved. If it’s good enough. If it’s magical.
Owned: Yes
Page count: 255
My summary: An invitation from esteemed horror director Davida Haym to consult on her new movie seems like a dream come true for Grubbs and Dervish. Recently recovered from their fight with Lord Loss, they eagerly accept the diversion from their real demons to help create some fake ones. But, as Grubbs discovers, there’s something all too real about the demons in Slawter...
My rating: 3/5
My commentary:
More demons! This book unfortunately falls foul of something I see in series I read as a child. Often I only owned about half of a series, and got the rest out of various libraries, so I’m more familiar with the ones I owned than the ones I did not. This is not a book I owned until relatively recently, and so I know it less intimately than the rest of the series. Does that mean I like it less? ...apparently yes! That’s more to do with the book itself, I think.
Let’s first talk about Grubbs and Dervish. I’d put Bill-E in here too, but much as I love him, kid doesn’t have as much of an arc as Grubbs. They’re recovering from the events of the first book, from Dervish’s trauma over being trapped in Lord Loss’ dimension and Grubbs’ trauma at being left behind for that and also having to take care of Dervish. I do like that, despite the happy ending of the previous book, things aren’t 100% fixed by Dervish’s return. He still needs care, and Grubbs, a teenager, is the one who has to give him this care. It’s an interesting dynamic and for the first few chapters, one I could really get into. My problem with this book is that Dervish grabs the idiot ball hard. He doesn’t believe Grubbs that the demons are real, despite being reasonably shrewd and practical early on, and doesn’t really contribute overall to much of the story. I’m not impressed with him.
Grubbs, meanwhile, gets more of a satisfying arc. Grubbs is learning and growing in his magic through the second half of the book, up to and including suddenly being amazing at fighting demons. This is a plot point, and one that’s not hard to guess the true nature of, though I suspect that’s deliberate and part of the point is that the reader is meant to figure out the Kah-Gash connection, while Grubbs has no way of knowing this. He’s maturing into a more practical, battle-weary young man, which is an interesting direction. He’s still a reasonably regular kid, but with hints of who he will become lurking beneath.
What else? Slawter itself doesn’t really interest me. The premise is cool - a movie about demons, where the director is summoning real demons - but I found myself not caring too much and I’m not sure why. Maybe an element is that the people in Slawter don’t get characterised in too much depth, bar a couple like Bo or Juni, and are mostly just there as demon fodder. I’m exaggerating slightly, it’s not quite as bad as all that, but I did find myself uninterested.
Here is where we get a little more demon lore. Demons can be summoned from their world, Lord Loss is one of a few demon masters that can sneak in, demons when they cross create a bubble of magic around them that humans can tap into - it’s all stuff that’s been implied before, but now we see it in more depth. Lord Loss himself doesn’t really show up too much until the end in this one. I don’t have much to say about him here, he’s much the same.
Overall, apart from Grubbs’ magic and Juni’s appearance, this really felt like a bit of a filler book to me. Nothing much happens to progress the overall plot, and while Grubbs grows to know his magic better and develop it, Dervish spends the entire book being useless. It’s also kind of grim overall, what with the wholesale slaughter (heh) of a lot of people including and especially children. Maybe that’s why I didn’t connect to it so much? I don’t know. It’s not bad, but it’s definitely my least favourite of the series as far as I recall.
Next up - we go back to Edwardian times, but there are no fewer demons. Well, maybe.
