Dead Witch Walking

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The Rachel Mor­gan Series has post­mod­ern tongue-in-cheek titles. It piqued my inter­est to see titles like A Fist­ful of Charms and For a Few Demons More on pulp-fan­ta­sy genre writ­ing. So as I’ve been get­ting tired of all the heavy read­ing I’ve been doing late­ly, these popped up as a less-chal­leng­ing alternative. 

As genre writ­ing goes, this isn’t bad. It’s very char­ac­ter-dri­ven and requires an absurd amount of will­ing sus­pen­sion of dis­be­lief, and with the excep­tion of a cou­ple of plot detours that did­n’t make much sense, rea­son­ably well-paced and engaging. 

Being so char­ac­ter-dri­ven instead of plot-dri­ven, how­ev­er, made for some cloy­ing and tire­some moments. Every char­ac­ter seems to be the author’s pride and joy, and many sim­ply fall into the realm of two-dimen­sion­al stand-in with a twist. Yes, the twists are clever and amus­ing, but they don’t real­ly give the read­er much to engage with. I found myself think­ing how clever Kim Har­ri­son was, but nev­er how inter­est­ing her char­ac­ters are. In the end there’s not a lot wrong with that. It’s sim­ply genre for­mu­la played out with a bit of skill. 

Dead Witch Walk­ing made for an amus­ing dis­trac­tion, but I’d want some more depth, more plot, more to catch my inter­est. Like most fan­ta­sy writ­ing, it came off like some­one writ­ing the tales of the role-play­ing game char­ac­ters they rolled up and got too involved in. Too much pre­cious­ness in char­ac­ter, too lit­tle atten­tion to cre­at­ing a com­pelling story. 

All that said, Kim Har­ri­son is a much more skilled writer than most of her col­leagues. If you want some fluff, this is not too insulting. 

Dead Witch Walk­ing, Kim Harrison 

4/10

Eos eBook, 2004 

432 pages 

http://ec1.images-amazon.com/images/I/21W4VEKVNHL.jpg

Published by splicer

One Reply to “Dead Witch Walking”

  1. Is this the first in the
    Is this the first in the series? It sounds like my cup of tea.

    By the way, have I pushed “Fly­boy Action Fig­ure Comes With Gas­mask” on you yet? If you want a well-writ­ten mod­ern-day sto­ry mixed with ele­ments of the fan­tas­tic (specif­i­cal­ly: super­heroes!), that *does­n’t* stick to genre con­ven­tions, it does­n’t get much bet­ter than Fly­boy. It’s one of my all-time favorite books, but it’s a light and easy read.

    It was orig­i­nal­ly put out by Harp­er Collins, and you can still buy it in paper­back, but the author (who hates pub­lish­ing com­pa­nies and is try­ing to forge a big self-pub­lish­ing move­ment) has released it as free e‑book. http://nomediakings.org/flyboy.htm