WHITE TRASH WARLOCK

A down-and-out warlock tries to help his estranged brother in this debut fantasy.

Adam Binder has always been different. He’s gay, for one, which wasn’t the easiest way to grow up in Guthrie, Oklahoma. He also has the Sight, which allows him to perceive the Other Side: the paranormal world of elves, demons, and lizard people hidden from most humans. To others, of course, he just seems disturbed, which is why his older brother, Robert, convinced his mother, Tilla Mae, to put Adam in a mental health facility when he was a teenager. Released two years ago when he turned 18, Adam has since become an independent detective of sorts. He’s been hunting down and destroying dark artifacts—objects like dice or pool cues constructed with magic materials—in order to trace their creator, a warlock who Adam believes may be his missing father. When Adam’s not battling the forces of darkness, he’s staying with his great aunt Sue in an Oklahoma trailer park, broke and underemployed due to his lack of a GED diploma. Unbeknown to him, things are about to change. He’s just received a text from his brother, who—finally acknowledging Adam’s supernatural gift—needs help with some crazy disturbances revolving around Robert’s wife, Annie, who has recently been behaving quite strangely. Despite their past differences, Adam agrees to help the couple. Family is family, after all. But when Adam gets to Denver, he discovers that the problem is much larger than Annie: A dark force is corrupting people across the city. The nemesis is a lot bigger than an amateur warlock like Adam is equipped to handle. He finds an unlikely partner in Vic Martinez, a police officer whose life Adam saves, inadvertently binding the two men together. In order to salvage his relationship with his relatives—if he really even wants to—Adam will first have to figure out a way to save them.

In this series opener, Slayton’s prose, which shifts between Adam’s and Robert’s points of view, is expressive yet controlled. Here, Adam ruminates on Tilla Mae’s role in his hospitalization: “His mother hadn’t stopped Bobby from locking him up. Hell, she’d signed the papers. And she hadn’t listened, hadn’t stopped the drugs, the tests, or the endless counseling sessions and group therapy, which had been the worst of it. He’d absorbed the horrors of the others and he’d fled further and further into the spirit world.” Adam is a wonderfully sympathetic protagonist, in part because so many of his conflicts with the world around him have nothing to do with fantasy. He’s poor, gay, abandoned by his family, and treated as if he’s crazy by nonmagical people. The Sight doesn’t have to be a metaphor for anything—everything is right on the page—and yet it works perfectly as a complementary attribute for someone who moves regularly through different spaces. The fantasy elements are familiar but fresh; the pacing is urgent; and the relationship between any two characters is usually more than a little bit fraught. Readers will wait with anticipation for further adventures in this rich underworld.

A stylish urban fantasy with fully realized characters.