Review: The Devil You Know
I finished Mike Carey’s The Devil You Know this morning. Eileene picked it up on sale with high hopes: Carey wrote the Lucifer comic book series, one of the few (very few) spinoff titles to feel like it’s actually compatible with the Sandman comics from which it was born.
Felix “Fix” Castor is a self-taught exorcist in the near future, a time when the dead have begun to walk the earth again. He runs a free-lance office that can’t quite keep up with the rent, which prompts him to take jobs he’d rather not. This includes an apparently simple case to remove a ghost from a government archive for personal documents of historical interest which rapidly winds deeper into a web of theft, prostitution, immigrant slavery, and murder. Castor knows he should just let it go, especially since Asmodeus himself has warned the exorcist away, but just can’t bring himself to—first for the money, then to aid the ghost he’s supposed to vanish.
The Devil You Know is fair to good. I think. It’s very difficult for me to judge.
My perceptions are badly distorted by the novel’s similarity to Jim Butcher’s Dresden Files series (Storm Front, Fool Moon, et al.), both being adaptations of the hardboiled detective novel by moving them to modernity and adding ghosts, werewolves, and demons for seasoning. The similarity of the protagonists—Felix Castor and Harry Dresden, respecdtively—is especially pronounced.
Both act as narrator, telling the story in first person, and spend a fair amount of time justifying themselves instead of describing unfolding events. That’s because they both are impetuous to a juvenile degree, noble and petulant by turns in a way that interferes with my sense of identification and sympathy. Neither can keep his mouth shut, despite his better judgment, especially when a choice quip presents itself. So they end up sabotaging their lives, and especially their relationships with their feisty women friends, all of whom perpetually complain of being left in the dark while the heroes go risking their necks. Both are rare cases of magically capable humans in a world where magic exists, but close enough to the fringes that many people can continue to disbelieve. This skepticism, coupled to impetuosity, explains why both protagonists can never make ends meet, or even be taken seriously, despite rare talents and a clear demand for their services—which they provide as freelance exorcist or magician. Pretty much the same thing, since Dresden’s cases all revolve around identifying and dispatching some supernatural entity. Their magical powers make them targets for weird inconveniences, about which they gripe endlessly.
The supporting casts are also quite similar, although this is more obviously an artifact of emulating classic detective novels. I mentioned the feisty women. There’s also crime lords, thugs, exorcist/magus competitors with fewer ethics but greater professional success, and a disinterested demon to taunt the protagonists for being in over their heads.
For all practical purposes, The Devil You Know is the same story as the Dresden formula. I read Dresden first, and it’s messing with my sense for novelty, creativity, background and character design to a degree that I’m hesitant even to talk about the writing quality. But I’m going to. Carey is, in many tiny ways, the better wordsmith. There is no passage one can point to and declare: “There! That is flatly superior writing!” Nonetheless, phrase by phrase, Carey tells the same story, and does it tighter, cleaner, and with just a bit more edge on the human capacity for sin, which is what the hard-boiled is all about. The difference, though subtle, is sufficient that I might recommend The Devil You Know on its own merits, while I wouldn’t recommend the Dresden Files without prompting from someone looking for books like them. At the very least, I’d recommend The Devil You Know to anyone who enjoys the Dresden Files series. I’d be more hesitant about the reverse.