Review: Demon by Rob J. Hayes
Blurb:
Dien Hostain was never meant to lead. She wasn't meant to survive.
Kind of heart and quick in temper, Dien expects to lead a simple life, learning her father's trade. But unbeknown to her, he was not always a carpenter. He's an exile, a traitor once known as the Peace Breaker.
When nightmarish demons attack the village of Berrywhistle, her father is murdered. Dien and the survivors are taken as thralls to live out the rest of their days in squaller and back-breaking labour. But Dien's blood boils with the need to escape and take her revenge.
They try to break her body. They try to break her spirit.
Will Dien take up her father's hammer and unite her people?
On wings of vengeance, a Saint shall rise.
Review:
It would be a bit of an understatement to call Rob J. Hayes’ new series, The God Eater Saga, an ambitious endeavor. After all, any attempt to release a trilogy of trilogies spanning three millennia—while releasing each trilogy’s first entry simultaneously—would be considered insane in lesser hands. Thankfully, Hayes’ hands are more than capable. And maybe he is insane.
If he is, goddamn, am I happy about it. Demon absolutely rules.
Chronologically the first in the God Eater Saga and the first entry in the Archive of the God Eater, Demon follows Dien Hostain, the daughter of a carpenter who loses everything in a demonic raid—including her family—and is forced to endure horrors and hard labor as a thrall to the pack of demons. As she toils in the demons’ labor camp with hope for survival growing slimmer and slimmer, she searches for escape and vengeance—but against the inhuman might against the demons, vengeance is not so easy a thing to achieve.
Right from the shoot, this book pulls absolutely zero punches. It is heavy, it is violent, and it is absolutely not for the faint of heart. People die, and horribly so. There’s torture, forced cannibalism, gore. I consider myself well adjusted to some of the grimmest of grimdark, and even I felt my stomach turn at some descriptions.
And yet, it’s to the strength of Hayes’ skills as a writer that he’s able to depict these horrors without it coming across as overly edgy or violent simply for the sake of. What he achieves is a hopelessly oppressive atmosphere where you feel all semblance of hope slipping away just as Dien and her companions do. You want them to escape, you want them to succeed, but you feel just as apprehensive about it all as they do. It’s marvelously crafted, and one of the biggest successes of the book.
But where Demon shines, as is typically the case of Hayes’ books, is in the character work. Dien is a fantastically realized character, even within the limitations of the book’s short page length. She is given great dimension that expands her beyond the narrowness of wanting to seek revenge against those who robbed her of everything. She’s crafty, strong-willed, unwilling to give up even in the face of all the brutality around her, no matter how many times she’s knocked down, and she’s only bolstered by an excellent supporting cast of various walks of life, good and bad. The complexity of enslavement is explored quite well here, from the captives from other villages who have been held by the demons for years and have resigned themselves to their fate, to those whose morals are so far gone that they could be considered no better than the demons themselves. It helps flesh out the brutal nature of the book; had it only been the demons as the antagonists, this could have ended up more of a one-dimensional tale, but having humans, people who Dien has known her whole life, acting in the same demonic manner only heightened the tension and left me fearing for what more could happen.
The pace of Demon is relentless, letting shit hit the fan right from the get-go and not stopping until the bloody conclusion. But despite that, things did tend to drag a little bit toward the middle as the horrors temporarily ceased. As a reader, it was certainly a welcomed reprieve from the carnage that preceded it before the carnage that was soon to come. The mundanity of those middle chapters was good for the blood pressure, at the least, and it still helped complete the fuller picture that Hayes was trying to paint. But for the rapid pace of the rest of the book, the wonky pacing of the middle was just enough to knock it down a tick for me. Thankfully, though, that ends quickly, and we are treated(?) to the horrors again in short order, so it’s really a minor complaint.
Demon is a heavy hitter in all the best ways. It’ll enthrall you right from the beginning and will refuse to let you go until the last drops of blood fall. It’s Rob J. Hayes at his grimmest and bloodiest, but it’s also him at some of his absolute best.
