Bad Magic
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- 11,99 €
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- 11,99 €
Publisher Description
Magic is real. Strange forces and uncanny creatures abound. Cosmic evil is loose in the world--especially around San Diego--along with transcendent evil, primordial evil, simmering evil, objective evil, and specific evil.
In sheer self-defense, most of the human race long ago taught themselves to shut their magical Third Eye, blinding themselves to this supernatural world around them. As protection goes, it's not 100% effective, but it's still pretty good: If you can't see them, they can't see you.
Fortunately for the rest of us, a few people can deal with the weirdness. In San Francisco, a motley group of adventurers have banded together to fight evil. They're an uncanny mix of alchemists, thaumaturges, necromancers, and totemists, working their wildly different magics in a milieu where thaumaturgy is a laboratory science and raw pain can be kept in a flask of liquid nitrogen. They know they don't know what they're doing. And they have to save a world that doesn't know it's under attack from forces that they wish were beyond comprehension.
Poised, headspinning, and richly inventive, Bad Magic from Stephan Zielinski shows us what people really see when their third eye opens.
At the Publisher's request, this title is being sold without Digital Rights Management Software (DRM) applied.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
As in the movie Men in Black, most people are mercifully unaware of the horrors that surround them in first-time author Zielinski's wacky occult fantasy. It's up to Al Rider and his cohorts, who operate out of San Francisco and are aware of and willing to use their third eye, to confront vampires, ghosts, zombies, zombie dogs (not to be confused with thin dogs) and a host of other undead creatures anxious to take over the world. While the humor is often scattershot and undisciplined, the author shows some genuine wit. One redundant, rapid-fire dialogue exchange could have been taken from Joseph Heller's Catch 22. When the heroes run on water, they do the "Sea of Galilee boogie." A recipe for preparing thin dog dinner makes a deliciously gruesome aside. But Zielinski doesn't play it strictly for laughs. At the start, Rider steals "invisibility" from a homeless woman for use as a cloak. "It will crumble at sunrise; the street person is, in part, defined by her invisibility, and so it must return to her." An appendix features a windy treatise, full of scholarly references, by a Miskatonic University professor. The final item, "the author's top ten rejected bio blurbs," will provoke more than a few smiles.
