REVIEW: The Long Way Down by Craig Schaefer
The Long Way Day by Craig Schaefer is the first of the Daniel Faust books. A neo-noir urban fantasy series, Daniel Faust is very similar to the early Harry Dresden books with all of their horrific murders and black magic. Daniel isn’t a private detective, though he does do a lot of occult investigation. No, instead, Daniel is a hitman with a code. If you have been hideously wronged and the law cannot help, then he is willing to make your perpetrator suffer in such a way that death is probably the least of their worries.
The premise for The Long Way Day gives you a good sense of how dark the books get and what sort of stories are being told: a porn star is murdered under suspicious circumstances in Las Vegas before being stuffed in a drainpipe. The victim’s father comes to Daniel seeking revenge as the police prove unwilling to do anything than label it an accident. Daniel proceeds to unravel the black magic involved as well as inflicting the maximum amount of horrifying damage he can to the guilty parties involved.
If I were to describe the series, I would go with the Dresden Files by way of LA Confidential. I’m a big fan of the latter and think that Craig Schaefer manages to capture the appropriate mixture of the grotesque with the cultured that it never becomes gratuitous. The Long Way Down manages to capture the spirit of Las Vegas and amp up the darkness contrasted to the neon glow. On one end, we have the dirty grimy criminal element, and the other has the literal forces of Hell. James Ellroy would be proud.
I really enjoyed the main character of Daniel Faust, who manages to be simultaneously likable but also guilty of numerous crimes. In a genre full of wise-cracking badasses, Daniel is extremely serious and devoted to his moral code. However, it’s a moral code that can at best be described as “flexible” what with being the hit man for hire that he is as well as the fact he willingly consorts with the very nasty forces of Hell.
I also give props to the character of Caitlin. A succubus who is enthusiastically a servant of Hell and capable of horrific acts of torture, she’s the second most likable character in The Long Way Down. She’s the kind of antihero that, alongside Daniel, makes this the kind of book that grimdark fans would enjoy. There’s a lot of excellent romantic tension, but it is the kind that I like: when you’re not sure one of the people involved will murder the other or not.
The Long Way Down is the first of a multibook series and much is set up in this volume versus being resolved as a standalone. I must give this book a lot of props, though. Craig Schaefer creates a very intricate underground community for supernaturals in his world as well as a coherent mythology. If you’re looking for an R-rated urban fantasy or occult detective series, then this is a solid place to start.
Read The Long Way Down by Craig SchaeferThe post REVIEW: The Long Way Down by Craig Schaefer appeared first on Grimdark Magazine.
