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Haunted by Kelley Armstrong
01/08/2005 . Source: Jennifer Howell 
pub: Orbit/Times Warner. 495 page paperback. Price: £ 6.99 (UK). ISBN: 1-84149-341-4). (pub: Bantam Spectra. 495 page paperback. Price: $ 6.99 (US). ISBN: 0-553-57808-0. Buy from Amazon US - Buy from Amazon UK
nb: US titles may only be available from Amazon US, and UK titles from Amazon UK. check out websites: www.OrbitBooks.co.uk and www.kelleyarmstrong.com
Another year, another Kelley Armstrong book, complete with another new narrator and yet another example of why these are some of the most entertaining and well written books in the genre today. This time around, it's the wickedest witch of them all, Eve Levine, who's due some character rehabilitation and what better way to do it than hunting down a demonic serial killer...
While Armstrong's first novel 'Bitten' works perfectly as a standalone meditation on embracing your inner werewolf, subsequent instalments 'Stolen', 'Dimestore Magic' and 'Industrial Magic' have fleshed out the original world into something at once snappy and mythologically satisfying. Switching narrators every couple of books, which initially sounded a worrying idea when the first book worked so well, has actually proved to be Armstrong's way of introducing fresh ideas, characters and settings into her protagonists' stories. Having said all that, I honestly never saw Eve as being the obvious choice for narrator of 'Haunted', book 5 in the series.
Previous readers will know that she crops up alive briefly before dying in book 2, 'Stolen'. This being a world of werewolves, vampires and more than the occasional witch, why on Earth would death stop Eve from joining in the fun though? As her daughter, Savannah, was being raised by Paige, the web-designer witch narrator of 'Dimestore Magic' and 'Industrial Magic', Eve has never been far from the stories. She appeared briefly from beyond the grave in 'Industrial Magic' and then managed to beat off several likely contenders (like Cassandra the Prada-clad vampire and Jaime Vegas, celebrity necromancer extraordinaire) to get book 5 all to herself.
Eve's problem as a character until now has always been her Wicked Witch of the South persona and her reputation for mass murder, of course. While it was becoming more obvious that Eve was never quite as bad as was made out in previous books, it's still nice to see a character who has no moral qualms whatsoever about dispatching the bad guys in the most efficient way possible.
While Armstrong's version of the afterlife is an eerily effective shadow-world of places stuck in various time periods of their heyday (Chicago is forever in the 1920s, for instance), it's also home to some serious wish fulfilment. Eve gets to live in the house of her dreams in antebellum New Orleans and spend some time catching up with Kristof Nast. That would be the sorcerer who also got killed off in 'Stolen', who just happens to be her ex and Savannah's unwitting father. Long story. It would be perfect, if not for all those pesky rules...
All Eve wants is to contact her daughter again. The only thing Eve can't do is affect the living world in any way and that includes her daughter. She also owes the capricious Fates a favour and they decide to call it by having her hunt down an evil spirit who has just escaped from Hell. The Nix being the kind of demon who likes to inspire serial killers, Eve has a problem on her hands - the kind of problem where all the previous people sent to do this job came back insane.
What follows is an insane and highly entertaining mix of 'Serial Killers 101' and Eve's various attempts to wriggle out of her dilemma and keep both her afterlife and her sanity intact. Careering through a variety of set pieces with either Jaime Vegas reluctantly in tow, Kristof tagging along for the ride or Eve's very own pet angel, the unpronounceable Trsiel, refusing to tell her what's really going on. You barely get the chance to draw breath for 500 pages and it's all good. Highlights especially include Pirate Town (rifting on a certain Johnny Depp film, methinks) and gory guided tours of both Lizzy Borden's house and Glamis Castle's history of massacres, not to mention a veritable smorgasbord of serial killers through the ages.
Eve is by turns both enjoyably ballsy and surprisingly vulnerable, veering between jaded and unshockable (she has a worryingly high body count of her own, of course) and yet incapable of thinking straight when confronted with the threat of losing any more connection with her daughter. Considering that this book probably goes deeper into horror territory than anything Armstrong has attempted before, she manages to balance the usual gallows humour with some genuinely disturbing scenarios (one particular serial killer hell still gives me the serious creeps).
In all, it's eminently readable while still managing to be packed with well-written, seriously well-researched good stuff and just when I thought the ending was going to irritate me, she manages to provide the perfect-note finale. All of which leads up to the return of everyone's favourite werewolf to narrate book 6 but having said that, we could do a hell of a lot worse than see some more of Eve. As always, hugely, hugely recommended.
Jennifer Howell
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