Samhain Publishing, $2.50, ISBN 1-60504-196-3
Fantasy Romance, 2008
Ooh, there are demons running wild in the town of Serendipity Falls. The name of that town seems vaguely familiar. I believe I may have seen that movie before. In the first five pages of this very short story alone, I am bombarded with words like “the Agency”, “Darkfall”, “Expeller”, and “dreamsharing”. While the meaning of some of these words are pretty obvious, don’t ask me to explain what, say, “Darkfall” is. I also have this vague idea that the Agency employs people with woo-woo abilities to hunt down spooks while keeping the non-woo-woo folks oblivious to the spooks that are walking among them, but that’s about it. The Agency is so mysterious that way, just like this story.
Bridget, who is… a healer and a Wiccan, I believe, is in town with her team mates to battle the spooks. There is something about a sorceress of fire coming to kill us all… or something like that. Talon, a fallen angel who is as mysterious as the rest of this story, has a thing with Bridget once upon a time and they… uh, defeat the demons, have sex, and woo-woo the way to the happy ending. Hurray! We can all pack up and go home now.
The problem with The Fallen is that it is short but packed with so many ill-explained concepts that I always feel as if I am playing some kind of annoying guessing game with the author. There are way too many things going on here and also one too many annoying Capitalized Word that will excite only the folks who know what they mean (in this case, that will be the author and some readers out there blessed with the ability to peer into the author’s mind).
At least the characters have fun doing whatever they are doing, I guess.
