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Life and Limb
Blood & Bone #1
by Jennifer Roberson
Daw, $26.00, 352pp
Published: November 2019

This one has sat on my TBR shelf for longer than it should have done, but I pulled it out to get signed at TusCon and felt it should also become my Arizona review this month. I'm not quite sure why I didn't dive into it sooner but part of it may be that Roberson is a thoroughly established and acclaimed writer of fantasy who's writing outside her usual genre. Did I really think that she was jumping on the urban fantasy bandwagon twenty years too late? Maybe subconsciously I did.

But now I'm happy I dived in. It took me a while to warm to this book but I did warm to it and I'm eager to see where Roberson takes the series, which could run on for a long time, even longer than the seven 'Tiger and Del' books or the eight in the 'Chronicles of the Cheysuli'. The biggest problem I had with this one was that it ended, because it serves emphatically as a beginning but not seemingly a complete one.

If what I'm imagining the series to be feels a lot like a TV show (and Supernatural is so clear a comparison that it's actually referenced in the text), this first novel feels very much like the first half of a feature length pilot. Hang about for the second half after the break... except that the break turns out to be two years long because 'Sinners and Saints' wasn't released until this year. What's odd is that, while it seems like a clearly bad thing to cut off the story like that, I'm not convinced that it really is.

And that's the same sort of thinking that meant that I had to warm to this. It felt off a lot, but when I thought about why it felt off, the logic seemed to be not only fair but refreshing. So I did what I rarely do and I checked out what other reviewers have said about this. What I found that's really interesting to me is that most of the things that people didn't like are the things that I did, at least once I thought about them.

The most obvious example is the fact that the spur for the story is jarring to its heroes and I'm struggling to remember the last time I read that in urban fantasy. Every take on the genre seems to reveal a hidden world to the protagonist who responds with an immediate acceptance, like an invisible shrug, and on we go as if the hidden world was never hidden. That doesn't happen here and, while it initially seemed annoying, it was the single aspect that I ended up appreciating the most.

The protagonists here are Gabriel Harlan and Remiel McCue, a pair of young men who were apparently born at almost exactly the same date and time, something that I'm sure is notably important for reasons we don't know yet. Otherwise, they're different in most regards, Gabe being a biker from Portland who's fresh out of prison and Remi being a cowboy from Texas who loves country music. But they both have a Granddaddy, the same Granddaddy, who isn't actually related to either of them, and he's who kicks this off.

He's an agent of Heaven, he explains to them at their first meeting, in a roadhouse in Flagstaff, Arizona. They're not angels but they do have Heavenly stuff in them and it's time for them to know that because they'll have to work together as a pair to use it to thwart the emergence of Satan and an otherwise imminent Apocalypse. In particular, they'll need to hunt demons, who will manifest as any number of mythological beasts or creatures, starting with a couple of ghosts.

Just imagine yourself in that situation. You trust your Granddaddy because he's been there for you all your life, but he introduces you to a complete stranger and springs all that on you. He gives you a ring and explains, very vaguely, that you've been training your whole life, without you knowing it, to save the world from the forces of evil. And you're not even religious. Yeah, it's going to sound batshit insane and I just don't buy into a quick acceptance. Even when weird shit goes down, that doesn't mean that this bizarre half-explanation covers everything.

And so Gabe and Remi struggle, not just initially but through the entire book, with an immense change in their life. So they successfully kill a demon by shooting the ghost it occupied with a holy weapon. What does that mean for their new reality? What else is real? What are the rules? What are the boundaries? What's still batshit insane even in this new reality? Who knows? Who can know? How wild is this going to get? I'd have so many questions in this situation and that makes me appreciate why Gabe and Remi feel so refreshing when they feel so lost.

After all, the initial reaction to the revelation that God and Satan are apparently real ought to be that the stuff that we've read about in the Bible is real too. That ought to be the new framework to accept, right? And that includes the obscure stuff, because a Grigori soon shows up to warn them that Granddaddy has an agenda that he's hiding. Grigoris are watchers, fallen angels who tend to sire Nephilim with human women. Of course, this Grigori is female and Asian just to mess with that assumption.

But then we meet the Morrigan, as in the Morrigan from Celtic legend, a goddess of battle, along with her sisters, who appear here as a wolfhound and a crow. Now, the Morrigan is hardly traditional, because she now has a red Mohawk and wicked tattoos that move and she drives an expanding RV because she occupies the Q role in James Bond movies, but the point is that she's not Christian. She's from Celtic mythology, so opening up to accept a Christian framework just isn't enough. So what else?

How about Aganju, the bartender at the Zoo Club in Flagstaff? He's an Igbo orishi, so from Nigeria, and he's a god of volcanoes. Apparently there are six hundred of them in Arizona, which blew my mind, and he sings them into life. That's about as far from Christianity as it gets. Roberson brings in a whole slew of mythologies and religions and cultures to populate this novel with characters. And the demons that have found their way into our world are occupying creatures of folklore, which now exist because they believe them so.

Needless to say, Gabe and Remi are wildly unprepared for any of this and they're not remotely ready to identify domiciles and hunt surrogates and whatever else they are now tasked with doing without having a clue what any of these things are, let alone a suggestion of what they do and how they do it, not to even approach how to stop it. In that context, it seems like a duh that they're frustrated and always questioning, but it really is something that I've not seen in urban fantasy before.

Of course, given that we learn about this stuff as they learn about it, which is usually at the most critical and dangerous moments, there's so much that we don't know yet. We're going to learn more in the next book, I'm sure, but, the way we're going, we'll be still learning crucial information ten books in, because the scope is so vast and the possibilities are so varied that it's hard to put a boundary around it to even figure out what questions to ask. We're not even close.

And, of course, this is firmly an origin story, or at least the beginning of one, with not a lot of room for actual plot. We're facing Armageddon and somehow these two guys are the potential solution: that's the plot. This book is about introducing us to a basic idea, the protagonists we'll follow and the supporting characters who will help or stir things up, as well as a little doubt cast on what we can believe. Is Granddaddy telling the whole truth and nothing but the truth or is he an unreliable teacher with his own agenda that he's keeping secret from everyone, including us? We just don't know.

And, in a genre where most things are explained quickly and accepted even quicker, I would call this a breath of fresh air. Now, let's get into a real story set within this wild framework with ‘Sinners and Saints’. I need to go buy that one. ~~ Hal C F Astell

For more titles by Jennifer Roberson click here

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