There is a path, Jack. I see it, through the haze, the fog, the sorrow, the fear. The demons you have to face, they are far from here.
Fablenoir
by Vic Sinclair
Genre: Urban Fantasy
About: Detective Jackson Slade is known as the Giantslayer, but he's a long way from the beanstalk that made his name and the small village he outgrew. In the mean streets of New York, his glory days are behind him. He might have been a good cop once but now he needs a drink and magick beans to get through the day. Until one night he's first on the scene to what looks like a suicide but soon becomes an investigation into missing girls, murder, and dark, twisted magic.
Thoughts
This is a really cool world to step into. It has characters from fairy tales in an urban fantasy setting with film noir vibes. If you've played The Wolf Among Us or Heavy Rain, I think you could really have fun with this book. It would also make a great game as there's a lot of mystery, action, and some really cool magic. I loved the heightened senses the magick beans gave Jack and how they tied into witchcraft and prophecies. I also think the Hatter's experiments added some extra darkness to the magic and hinted to more world-building in future books with Wonderland being somewhere to explore possibly?
So the setting and characters were definitely really interesting to me. Where I think this book missed the mark was in its pacing. The writing was immersive and had some great lines, but it's incredibly over-written. There was just too much detail. Every action, every thought, every sound or smell would be given to the reader. We'd get so many meaningless details in a scene that it would distract from the scene itself. Conversations would be similarly stretched out with so much back and forth before anything useful was said. Although the descriptions and dialogue match in with the world, they felt like overkill at times and made me lose focus on the actual story.
I also wasn't sold on the ending. I do appreciate that it's made super clear that this is a series so of course I'd expect to have some loose threads by the end, but I didn't get a lot of satisfaction from the big show down. Throughout the book there are hints of Jack's destiny and he himself gives this very cool line about how the giant made the mistake of underestimating him, but his role in the end is more of a To Be Continued moment. Which is fine that he has a bigger role to play in later books, but I would have liked to have seen him have a more significant moment in this one - he felt a little too much like a spectator towards the end.
Overall, I think this series has a lot of potential and it's highly imaginative but the story itself could have been a lot tighter if bigger edits had been made to the prose.
Comments