URBAN FANTASY REVIEW: Desdaemona - Ben Macallan (Chaz Brenchley)

Release Date: 31/05/11

SYNOPSIS:

Jordan helps kids on the run find their way back home. He’s good at that. He should be – he’s a runaway himself.

Sometimes he helps the kids in other, stranger, ways. He looks like a regular teenager, but he’s not. He acts like he’s not exactly human, but he is. He treads the line between mundane reality and the world of the supernatural.

Desdaemona also knows the non-human world far too well. She tracks Jordan down and enlists his aid in searching for her lost sister Fay, who did a Very Bad Thing involving an immortal. This may be a mistake – for both of them. Too many people are interested now, and some of them are not people at all.


REVIEW:

Urban Fantasy is an area that is getting a good amount of attention these days and whereas with some, America is an exotic place to visit (at least it is to those in the UK) the home-grown talent for UF tends to focus itself more with the big cities. What unfurls in this UF offering from Ben Macallan (pseudonym of author Chaz Brenchley) is a story that concentrates on character and personal relationships over the big exotic landscape. It’s cleverly written the overall arc intriguing but when you add a whole mythos of its own devising into the mix it’s a tale that is very different to a lot of the other titles out there.

Which, to be honest, is pretty much what I’ve come to expect from Solaris. As usual, they don’t compromise on talent but with so many titles treading along a well-worn path, the ones released by this publisher like to hack their way through the undergrowth to create something different. All in its well done, it has some great prose and with a protagonist that many will be able to associate with it’s a title that deserves to be explored at the very least.