Hold Me Closer, Necromancer
The Necromancer series, Book 1
Lish McBride
Square Fish
Fiction, YA? Fantasy/Humor
Themes: Cross-Genre, Fantasy Races, Ghosts, Hidden Wonders, Magic Workers, Shapeshifters, Undead, Urban Tales
**+
Description
Ever since he dropped out of college, Sam has been adrift in life, scraping by at a dead-end fast food job on Seattle while
waiting for... something. What, he doesn't know, but he's always felt like he was lost, and doesn't have a clue as to where or
what he's supposed to be, even as he drifts toward an age where he really ought to have some idea. Sometimes, though, destiny
doesn't wait patiently to be found. It marches into the lobby of a fast food restaurant and literally grabs you.
Sam doesn't know what the strange, if impeccably dressed, man is raving about (well, aside from the fact that he and his
friends broke the tail light of his illegally-parked Mercedes while playing "potato hockey" during break time at work), but
all of a sudden Sam is the target of increasingly violent attacks - from the hulk of a man who stops a speeding car with
nothing but a bare fist to the arrival of a box containing the severed head of best friend Brooke.
But it's not until Brooke's head begins to talk that Sam and his buddies Ramon and Frank realize that there's something far,
far stranger going on than one fanatic avenging a car.
Sam has gotten on the bad side of Douglas, the most powerful necromancer in the region and leader of the local council of
hidden magicians and magical beings, encompassing everything from witches to vampires to werewolves and more. Worse, Douglas
seems to have the ridiculous idea that Sam himself is also a necromancer, and therefore a potential threat. But that's
impossible, right? Someone would've told him by now, wouldn't they? Whether or not he believes it, Sam has one week to answer
Douglas's ultimatum/threat, or everyone he loves may end up like Brooke - or worse.
Review
Pine trees and blue jays... I have lived not far from Seattle all my life. I have a passing familiarity with local flora
and fauna. Which is how I know that the green hills around Seattle are green with Douglas firs (and Western red cedar, and
other evergreens that are not, by and large, pines), and the blue birds with the distinctive black and crested heads at
feeders are resident Steller's jays; pines take over east of the Cascades (you can roll down the windows going over
Snoqualmie Pass, and when you smell pine you know you're in Eastern Washington), and blue jays - which are more blue and
white, not blue and black - are only occasional visitors this far west. What, you may ask, does this have to do with a book
about a bumbling necromancer-in-training trying to simultaneously discover his heritage and save the lives of everyone he
loves? Well, when that book repeatedly refers to both pine trees and blue jays as common parts of the landscape, and never
once to Douglas firs or Steller's jays, while insisting that it's set in Seattle and narrated by a Seattle native, that
little error becomes quite glaring. It makes it that much harder to suspend disbelief. It makes me that much more likely to
look for other holes and errors, and generally not really believe that the story knows what it's about. If nothing else, it
makes me think that the main character and others are, frankly, morons if they have lived so much of their lives in Seattle
and still cannot tell a Douglas fir from a pine, nor a Steller's jay from a blue jay. It does not, in short, set me up to
like a story.
In truth, I cannot blame that error entirely for the rating. Sam and his friends (and enemies) earn it well enough on their
own. Not a one exhibits much in the way of brains; even the bad guys are flat, obvious, and don't seem to have thought
through their plans. They all have a talent for doing the least intelligent thing at the least intelligent time for the
least explicable reasons, and need repeated blows from two-by-fours to figure anything at all out... and even then the
lesson may not stick. Women are invariably reduced to things needing rescuing, or mere enablers of Sam and the boys; Brooke,
introduced as a strong and gutsy girl, is basically fridged (save her chattering head, who doesn't do much except be a
chattering head), while Sam's mother is both overprotective and incapable of basic logic (she hid the fact that she was a
witch - hardly a spoiler - from Sam's father, then declares that she didn't want to live her life lying to a man she
ostensibly loved... after marrying him and getting pregnant with his child and not having said a word, and already having
multiple hints that the guy didn't want anything to do with magic - Petunia in the Harry Potter series at least
knew what she was doing when she married the most mundane and magic-averse Muggle in existence, so what's Sam's mother's
excuse?). There's also a werewolf woman whom we first meet naked in a cage, captive of Douglas. We're told she's a
formidable character, but she's basically there to be a victim and otherwise be secondary to Sam (in more ways than I can
get into without spoilers, but suffice it to say that introducing a character in a situation like that... yeah, things go
like you'd probably expect at some point, because why else would you have a naked, helpless woman lounging around in a cage
when the good guy becomes a captive, too? Is it really a spoiler if the whole thing glaringly signals its own
outcome?).
In its favor, the story doesn't generally drag. Even when the characters sit around dithering and not acting to further the
plot, they're actively dithering. Several elements are introduced that get minimal follow-through on, possibly to sow seeds
for the sequel. At some point, Sam runs out of excuses to be useless and stupid and everyone gets around to playing out the
climax, followed by a wrap-up that mostly exists to set hooks for the sequel.
I have, of course, read worse, and there was potential in the setup. I just could not connect with a single character, could
not care about the situations or their choices, and, try as I might, I just could not excuse storytelling so lazy it could
not take the time (five minutes max in any given search engine, or just talking to someone who lives here) to research what
kind of birds and trees are found in Western Washington near Seattle, because it sure isn't pine trees and blue jays...