Sorcerers, demons, and social justice warriors unleash hell on Earth in this fantasy adventure.

Ever since her girlhood hobby of carving Gaelic sayings into white stones opened her to supernatural intrusion, 28-year-old London security guard Shelby Schouwenaars has shared her body and consciousness with a demon. Named Fen, the entity manifests as a blue mist that gives her superhuman strength and self-healing powers. Their relationship eventually becomes a psychodrama of bickering and, somehow, sex, and Fen introduces Shelby to other sorcerers—humans like her who bond with demons that take the form of a muscular arm, a dagger, or a 7-foot-tall blue bodyguard. She soon gets embroiled in a conflict between sorcerer covens vying for the favor of the demon queen Lilith, which leads to several massacres, including Shelby’s slaughter of a Las Vegas sex coven after its head sorcerer rapes her. (She spares coven member Jenn Blake, a blacksmith with whom she begins a lesbian affair.) Fomenting the war is sorceress Monique D’Aubainne—her servants include a cherub demon that yanks out opponents’ internal organs—who plans to conquer the world by binding demons from the Nether plane to her followers. She recruits these followers with muzzy, left-ish speechifying, exhorting a campus Young Socialists of America group to “become one with every benevolent collectivist philosophy.” Hypnotized, they denounce “the virulent disease of capitalism” along with “masculinity, currency and fossil fuels”; don black garb; and revile Shelby as an “imperialist parasite.” Assisted only by Fen’s power mist, a 300-pound suit of armor and a 210-pound sword forged by Jenn, a Colt .45 pistol, and several attack helicopters, Shelby has to take on the demon-enthralled radicals and worse to thwart Monique’s scheme. In this vigorous yarn, Kazi crafts an intricate, richly drawn fictive world. Less successful are his ham-fisted parody of the woke left and the long scenes of splattery carnage, which feel monotonous after the umpteenth dismemberment. At one point, Shelby relates: “His torso rips off of his lower body and flies off to the side, while my follow-through catches another in the lower thighs, cutting him right off his knees, making everything above his lower legs flip and spin in mid-air, painting the entire corridor in blood.” The story is more gripping when it explores the twisty power plays of good-hearted characters coping with inner demons.

An imaginative, contemporary sword-and-sorcery epic hampered by cartoonish gore and heavy-handed politics.