A Fistful Of Charms by Kim Harrison
My Rating: 1/5 Stars
The charm was lost on me. Maybe I need to remove the stake from the nape of my neck, devour a clove of garlic in less than 12 seconds, follow it up with some red Kool-Aid, douse myself in holy water, and then shoot a silver bullet up my bum. Or maybe I should tell all the werewolves, witches, pixies, and vampires to suck it, and that I’ll handle the trials and tribulations of dangling from a rope myself. Instead of plunging a few of my fantasies into ecstasy, I was left with a look of horror on my face, and a belief that I somehow showed up to the wrong party on the wrong day and with the wrong date. I’d equate it to watching a chicken with boxing gloves beat the crap out of a coyote.
The Hollows kept me firmly in the shadows. Flipping the pages was like dragging my knuckles through glass and battery acid, reading the dialogue caused multiple convulsions, and listening to Ivy whine in time would have instigated trips to multiple psychiatric specialists and probably more than one straightjacket stint. At the Turn I wanted to burn a stake through my heart, roughly somewhere in the middle of Inderland where black spells and hexes and disguise charms and demon curses forced me to question the limits of my own sanity. To use an expression presented in A FISTFUL OF CHARMS: shit on crap.
I suppose vampires might inhabit Cincinnati, but I can think of plenty of other places I’d rather reside were I to wake up one morning and enter the land of the undead. Even within Ohio, I’d rank other major C cities Cleveland and Columbus higher up the residential map. But, hey, that’s just me.
Sure, there was a plot, but I have no idea what the hell happened. If I were to get shot in the foot, whacked over the head (and knocked unconscious), strapped to the front of a wooden roller coaster at Cedar Point, and then shoved against a brick wall at over ninety miles an hour, I’d probably have an easier time describing what happened to the authorities (assuming I miraculously survived).