Trigger warning for self-harm.
Cassandra Khaw (of The Salt Grows Heavy) and Richard Kadrey (of the Sandman Slim series) team up in The Dead Take the A Train to deliver a gore-spattered tale of a hex-first-ask-questions-later anti-heroine, a new love, scheming corporate sorcerors, and way more mysteries than I could shake a haunted stick at. Readers with cast iron stomachs will find a lot here to love—especially with Halloween on the horizon. If you don’t have such a stomach, you might want to pass on this one unless you can strategically turn off your ability to picture what’s happening in the book in your head.
Julie Crews makes a living in the margins of an already marginal society. She then uses the cash she earns exorcising ghosts and demons, fighting supernatural critters, and the like, to buy drugs and—if anything is left over—pay rent to her extremely tolerant landlady. Her unique brand of magic involves harnessing the power of pain to create spells or unleash magical tattoos to lash back at whatever beastie is currently trying to kill her. Julie is the kind of world-weary anti-hero I love. She metes out a violent kind of justice against the entitled, the cruel, or evil on behalf of the innocent even though she knows that she can only temporarily right wrongs. To put it another way, she’ll keep tossing starfish out to sea while at the same time trying to punch the tide for hurting the poor little guys.
After reluctantly taking a job from her much-loathed ex-boyfriend, Tyler, Julie finds herself caught up in a years-long, eldritch, scheme hatched by members of the mysterious Thorne & Drake organization. (We don’t get too many details about what the corporation is doing other than that they’ve made details with creatures that probably should have been avoided like ten plagues.) Tyler is the kind of repulsive corporate ladder climber that wouldn’t be out of place in a cutthroat law firm or on the floor of the New York Stock Exchange. He should never have been entrusted with any kind of power over anything; I wouldn’t trust him not to turn a wet paper bag into a plan to seize some kind of power. Even though I know Tyler is an evil little shit, I could never have predicted the twists and turns he executes in this book.
On Julie’s quest to 1) figure out what the hell is going on and 2) how to fix it, Julie has a trio of allies that add a wonderful note of found family and love to what would otherwise be a series of scenes involving exploding bodies and inexplicable rituals. These characters raise the stakes as they teach the traumatized Julie to trust someone other than herself for a change; they give Julie someone to fight for. And while they might not have a lot of ideas about #2, they do amazing work figuring out what Julie is up against as she fights Lovecraftian monsters, vengeful witches, and capitalist scumbuckets like Tyler. Best of all, they have enough mojo of their own to make them more than easy targets for Julie’s enemies.
In addition to the wonderful characters Khaw and Kadrey created, I loved how original The Dead Take the A Train is. There are some nods to Lovecraft but, honestly, there are so many things in Julie’s world that I’ve never seen before or heard of from fantasy or horror fiction. This is an incredibly rich world where you need to be really careful about what books you read, immortality can result from weird bargains, there are entities like gods in the wires, and the city around you can have untapped magic. I’m really looking forward to future books in this series because I want more time with Julie and her motley family and more details about her strange universe.
I received a free copy of this book from the publisher via NetGalley, for review consideration.