Another Iron in the Fire

About a year ago now, I posted about the first book of Kevin Hearn's Iron Druid Chronicles, a long-running fantasy series about an ancient Earth-magic user hiding out in modern-day Arizona. I noted that it gave me Dresden Files vibes, but that I'd enjoyed it a bit more than the last book or two I'd read in the Dresden series. I planned to give book two a try at some point, and now I have.

Hexed sees protagonist Atticus facing threats on multiple fronts: there's an angry witch coven after him in the wake of book one, a fallen angel committing grisly murderers all over town, a mysterious pair of men arriving on the scene with unclear intentions, and a Celtic goddess looking to extract knowledge from him by any means.

If that sounds like a lot, it is. Though Hexed is a tight and brisk book, I found it surprisingly muddled. I must confess, I finished reading it a while ago and simply didn't get around to blogging about it right away. In that time, my memory of the plot dimmed to a degree where I needed to revisit a synopsis to recall all the different threads in play. It's like three or four episodes of an "Iron Druid TV series" all got mixed together, each taking turns "on screen" until they finally converge in the last fifth of the book. It seems to be made for Netflix-style bingeing more than it is "a chapter or two before bed each night for a few weeks."

Two books into this series, it seems pretty clear to me that Hearn's main strength as a writer is character. In another similarity to the Dresden files series, the Iron Druid books seem to be adding in plenty of people to recur later. The personalities are vivid, even if some of the names derive from languages that don't come so easily to an American reader.

But plot? It's pretty typical evaporating pulp: entertaining enough to pull you through a short read, but little more than that. If clever language is the thing you prize in a writer? Don't look for that here either. I find Hearn's prose well up to the task of painting a picture in the mind's eye, but you never "sit up and take notice" of a sentence for its own sake.

Still, Hexed did deliver on its main promise of serving up some fluffy, escapist fun. I'd give it a B-. That moves it into territory where book three will really have to compete with other things in my queue (perhaps Dresden most of all). It's "good enough," but not so great that I want to reach for the next volume above other waiting books. We'll see what happens.