Daemons Are Forever

By Simon Green

Eddie Drood is from one the oldest families in England, a family that has been protecting Humanity from the forces of darkness for more centuries than anyone can even remember. In the first Eddie Drood novel, The Man With The Golden Torc, Eddie had to go to war with his family to save their collective souls and now, as punishment, he finds himself running the family in order to redeem it.

And now he’s just in time to go to war against the Loathly Ones. But they are just the footsoldiers of the Hungry Gods who are building gateways into our world, bent on leeching our souls and conquering Earth. Now Eddie has to pull the family together to save the world from the most destructive force they have ever encountered. Too bad he’s losing…

I’m a big fan of the comic fantasy – Pratchett, Rankin, Fforde et al – and while Simon Green isn’t quite up there with those guys, at this rate he is well on the way. What makes this instantly appealing is that all of the action takes place in our own world. It’s the comic appeal of that which is directly in front of us that we cannot see as we hustle through our own humdrum lives, and what Green does brilliantly is craft this adjacent world of bizarre creatures and equally bizarre behaviour that is always just out of sight of us mere mortals.

But of course it’s not the world it’s the characters that populate it that suck us in and keep us there. Eddie Drood is a wise-cracking action hero, part spy, part noir detective, instantly likeable and not as invulnerable as he likes to make out. He’s in love with Molly Metcalfe, Wild Witch of The Woods. They used to try and kill each other, now they are an item, something that has surprised and delighted them both. Then there’s the rest of the Drood family; Martha Drood, The Matriarch, erstwhile leader of the Drood clan and usurped by Eddie taking over, Harry Drood, Eddie’s competition for the top seat and Roger, his lover and a Hell Spawn. There’s the ghost of Jacob Drood who has something he needs to do but cannot remember what, and there’s Eddie’s Uncle Jack, the family armourer…the list goes on, each of them both funny and endearing by turns and each with their own axe to grind.

The story does effortlessly swerve from the bizarrely romantic to the dramatic to the action-packed by turns, the pacing is terrific and the writing easy to digest, bristling with that peculiarly English sense of humour, a kind of laughing in the face of absurdity and taking no nonsense from those who would seek power, whether it’s men with clipboards or demons from hell, and the family in-fighting is a lot like family in-fighting anywhere, except with slightly more fatal consequences, which makes it all the funnier as you can really understand where those actions come from.

A nicely put together tale of derring-do, brimful of good humour but with something more to offer as well, Daemons Are Forever is a good, fun read and well worth the price of admission. This series is going to get better and better and I’m looking forward to the next one immensely.

Daemons Are Forever is published by Gollanz and is available from Amazon, Blackwell and all good book stores.