Bloodangel, Justine Musk.  The cover offers a blurb from Poppy Z. Brite, and it was Brite I most often thought of while reading this.  Bloodangel might flippantly be described as Brite-lite - Brite is one of the few authors whose craft I respect without being able to read any longer;  the darkness in works like Lost Souls and her short works is unrelenting and far, far too sharp for me to stomach.  Musk's Bloodangel successfully balances on the knife edge between darkness and revulsion; it offers destructive behavior, otherworldly ennui and disaffected youth alongside a reasonably inventive reconstruction of demonology and Aboriginal evocations of the dream-time.  The characters have just enough humanity in them to make you want to know more, and while the ending's conclusive enough, this is a world I wouldn't mind seeing more of in future works.

Read September 2006