If dark urban fantasy is a genre, Susan Ee's Angelfall is the best example of it that I've come across this year. Angelfall is dark, though not oppressively so, and it's fun to read even at times when the characters aren't having fun at all. Maybe even especially at those times. Even though it's a few weeks after the end of the world and what's left of society is going downhill fast, I still found the book not just entertaining but fun...a lot more so than, say, The Road, though at times the situations aren't any less grim.
The book itself has an overall feel reminiscent of Rob Thurman's Cal Leandros stories, if, say, the Alph had won the big battle on the first page. Ee evokes a world, through snatches of imagery and introspection and conversation, where survival means working around/with/in hiding from several distinct outside forces, each with its own well-considered agenda. Characters' near-obsessive motivations are tempered by physical limitations, constant fear and danger that can come from behind, above or below at any time. This is not a violent book per se, by my standards at least, but it doesn't shy away when violence is called for by the story. It's also not the kind of story where super-powerful characters whale on each other until it's time for the good guy to win.
The thing that makes this story stand out from the crowd is its characters, and the characters in this book are right up there in the Stackhouse/Kate Daniels/Anita Blake league. While Penryn Young, Angelfall's narrator/main character, shares some attributes with all of these very different female hero characters, I'd say in my view she most reminds me of the Hunter Kiss character from the Marjorie Liu series of the same name...minus the tattoos. In the context of this story, Penryn isn't a "huntress" per se, though I'd imagine that could change to some extent as this series shapes up. But she's got the personality, values and unexpected skills to develop over the series into a thoroughly plausible action-hero-with-a-heart.
Angelfall doesn't portray its characters as superhuman (except the non-human ones, and they have plenty of flaws of their own) or gloss over the hardships they face. They squeeze a lot of mileage out of what they have, though, often in unexpected ways. Penryn, as the narrator, is naturally the most fully developed character, and is thoroughly likable for her strengths and human weaknesses. We learn about her enemy/ally/inappropriate love interest in dribs and drabs as she pieces his story together over time, and an interesting character portrait emerges with lot of potential to develop further over additional volumes. But I'd have to say the prize for creepiest character, and my personal favorite, is her mother. Completely squawking insane, though loving in her own way, she's the part of the story that caught my attention early on. With her increasingly bizarre contributions, chilling comments and hidden capabilities and predilections, I loved every appearance she made, and the sense that she's always lurking somewhere nearby while simultaneously trapped in her own dreadful little world. That the world outside more and more resembles her inner world is not lost on the observant reader, and you wonder where that aspect of the story will go over time. I can think of five or six more characters easily meriting mention here, but I don't want to plant spoilers by talking about characters introduced later in the story.
The book is written in a narrative style that I don't think I've ever seen done before, at least not that I can recall, and I can't remember ever even hearing of it being done well until now. It's told in the first person, present tense. It took me a couple of pages to get used to it, but then I found myself liking it--a lot, actually. (If you write an email or something after reading a chapter or two of this book, you might find yourself writing that way...don't hit send until you check!) The advantages of this style are readily apparent and more significant than you would think until you see it. It's the fastest-paced of all possible styles, since you feel as if it's happening in real time right now. There's none of that standard sense of anticlimax that comes from knowing that a typical first-person past-tense "narrator" would have had to come through everything alive and well, more or less, to "write the book" later. There also isn't that sense of retrospective omniscience that comes from a "narrator" character supposedly recounting the story later with the blanks filled in. We have only the information the character has, and the result is an exceptionally engaging experience of feeling yourself in her shoes.
This book is a winner, and its author has it going on with this lineup of unique characters and their "beginning-after-the-end" post-apocalyptic backdrop. There an experience here that's definitely worth expanding on; I'm already looking forward to the next book in this series.
