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No Humans Involved

by Kelley Armstrong

If you read only one “pre-menopausal necromancer dates werewolf and battles fake reality-TV psychics and real-life teen-runaway-abducting cultists” horror novel this year, No Humans Involved might not be the best choice.

The seventh of 10 planned Women of the Underworld novels – or eighth of 11 if you include one novella – No Humans Involved follows the exploits of Jaime Vegas, one of three celebrity mediums gathered for a competition to raise Marilyn Monroe’s ghost on network television.

Jaime is surrounded by freaks – and not just demons, unquiet spirits, TV production staff, werewolves, witches, etc. Rather, everyone around her is freakish because they constantly speak in full-on expository mode. They argue at length over the preferred mode of human sacrifice, even listing the stages of suffering. Interesting material, perhaps, but it’s not dialogue. Jaime’s interior monologue, prone to summarizing the obvious, fares little better: “I’d alienated both my co-stars, discovered the garden was haunted by a malicious spirit and falsely raised the hopes of a murdered ghost. All in my first day on the show I hoped would take my career to the next level. Off to a rousing start.” You groan, girl.

Armstrong, who has a degree in psychology, originally applied her schooling to an examination of pack mentality in the first two WotU novels, Bitten and Stolen, whose primary concerns were power struggles within the werewolf regime, and which mixed horror with higher drama and less camp than this outing. Admittedly, those books had a different narrator – the series has had five so far – but the decline of this series from thinking-woman’s horror to, if you will, Harlequin horror is palpable and disappointing.

 

Reviewer: Gary Butler

Publisher: Random House Canada

DETAILS

Price: $29.95

Page Count: 352 pp

Format: Cloth

ISBN: 978-0-307-35576-8

Released: May

Issue Date: 2007-7

Categories: Fiction: Novels