Joss Whedon’s supernatural TV shows Buffy the Vampire Slayer and its spinoff Angel regularly featured storylines involving demons, powerful supernatural beings from the Hell dimensions. As the series progressed, this demon mythology deepened and expanded to include myriad species and personalities, some wholly evil and others downright tender-hearted, as well as a detailed and complex culture. What made these demons so entertaining was that, despite their exotic nature, they had more or less the same intrigues, conflicts, and mundane concerns as humans—albeit on a cosmic level.
Kaylin McFarren’s Gehenna series of paranormal romance-thrillers takes the idea of a “demonverse” and imagines it on a vastly more elaborate scale. ANNIHILATION, the second installment in the series, revisits the fantastical world of demons and angels (and their sex lives) introduced in McFarren’s first volume, Soul Seeker, this time focusing on demonic politics and intrigue as the Hellish host vies for power in anticipation of a great war against Heaven. While unrelated to Buffy or Angel, there’s more than a touch of Whedon’s influence in McFarren’s vision of demons and angels that, unlike traditional Christian depictions, inhabit a complex moral system without easy heroes or villains. ANNIHILATION’s protagonist, Samara, daughter of the darkly romantic Crighton Daemonium (returning from Soul Seeker), at times resembles Buffy Summers reimagined as a Hellspawn. Comparisons to the Whedonverse give short shrift, however, to the staggering degree of imaginative detail McFarren has invested in her narrative universe. From its overstuffed Hieronymus Bosch canvas of beautiful and grotesque characters to an ambitious plot that weaves together byzantine political intrigue and intimate romantic entanglements, the novel’s meticulous world-building is truly impressive.
For all its Miltonian scale and Shakespearean machinations, ANNIHILATION is still a steamy romance, and the grandeur of its narrative sweep is often undercut—or, depending on the reader’s sensibilities, balanced out—by conventional genre tropes and interludes of softcore sex that feel at odds with the story’s doom-laden, apocalyptic stakes. Characters too often lack depth, coming across as assemblages of personality traits and stylish outfits created for effect rather than authenticity. Still, ANNIHILATION has much to offer readers hungry for stories of supernatural love and intrigue.
A romantic coming-of-age tale intertwined with a massive dark fantasy epic, Kaylin McFarren’s ANNIHILATION–a thrilling expansion of the Gehenna universe–will leave readers eager for the next chapter.
~Edward Sung for IndieReader