Jackie Kessler is a good writer. All the time I was reading The Road to Hell, I was thinking I hope she writes something else soon. However, this particular book wasn’t for me.

It’s not hugely surprising that it didn’t appeal to me. I’m not much of an urban fantasy fan and I’m really not keen on the sort of dry, arch first person POV employed by the heroine, so it was always going to be an uphill struggle for Kessler to win me over. Having said that, I have no doubt that there are lots of urban fantasy fans out there who will love Jesse’s voice. (Bam, for one, liked the first book in this series.

Before I get onto the reasons why I didn’t like The Road to Hell, let me indulge myself with a couple of examples of Kessler’s rather gorgeous prose, like this bit of the prologue:

As I die now, feeling strong arms holding me tight, hearing a voice whisper it’s okay, my mind plays back the events that set me on the road to Hell, good intentions and all. Faces flash behind my closed eyes, almost too fast to follow - the incubus’s fang-filled grin, the Erinyes hissing with reptilian fury, the angel crying fat, salty tears. My love, my White Knight, a name on his lips that isn’t mine…

High stakes and intimations of grief to come. Very nice.

And this bit where Jesse’s ‘friend’ from Hell shows her the physical proof of his latest promotion:

A humming, deep, like the slow waking of hornets in winter. Then a ripping sound, followed by a crack of bones. Something rose behind Daun, unfolding, growing up and out, until he was surrounded in shadow. It split in two, stretched out behind him, huge, batlike, as blue as his flesh.

Wings…

I marked a lot of quotable passages like these as I read this book. It was these bits that kept me reading - otherwise this would probably have been a DNF for me.

The Plot

This is book 2 in the Hell series. In book 1, Hell’s Belles, the Demon Jezebel, a succubus, runs away from Hell after a change of management decrees that she has to change the job she loves - seducing the damned - for one that isn’t her cup of tea - scaring them to death. Jezebel hides in a human body and becomes Jesse. In short order she enters into a career of stripping-cum-lap-dancing, falls in love with mortal vice-cop Paul and - in trying to save his life - gains herself a human soul.

At the start of book 2, Jesse and Paul are in the early stages of their relationship and Jesse is still happily stripping and lap-dancing. However, the disgruntled management of Hell are not prepared to let her defection rest and Paul is borne off to Hell. With the help of her ex-colleague from Hell, Daun, a turquoise-skinned satyr, and his inept celestial assistant, Angel, Jesse goes after her lover to rescue him from an eternal damnation that is in breach of all the rules.

The Heroine

I swithered between liking Jesse and loathing her. On the plus side, she’s sparky and brave, and although her dry, knowing voice really wasn’t for me, she was funny. But I found her a very inconsistent heroine. I wasn’t really sure how to peg her at all.

Take, for instance, her attitude to sex. Jesse seems to spend the entire book lusting after every single male being that hoves into view. Daun is the most prominent among these (she seems to have more sexual encounters with him than with Paul) but also on the list you would find Jesse’s lapdancing customers and even an overweight handyman:

The super was one of those pear-shaped men that always look like they’re wearing a girdle but really aren’t. His paint-splattered overalls emphasized his curves in ways that would make Jessica Rabbit jealous. While his body wasn’t exactly a paragon of manliness, his mocha skin looked delicious enough to slurp. Beneath his white baseball cap, he had mounds of black hair. I wondered if it was soft or wiry, how it would feel as I ran my fingers through it…

Whilst every sentence is paved with Jesse’s good intentions to stay true to Paul (who she regards as her true love), she seems to be tempted away from the path of fidelity with dismaying ease.

The book contains several scenes in which Jesse enthusiastically strips for a crowd of men. The narrative of these scenes suggests that it isn’t a case of merely liking stripping; stripping is for Jesse an expression of Who She Is. This is her reaction to Angel’s suggestion that she stops dancing:

“You’re saying that I should stop dancing?” Stop basking in the spotlight, stop peeling my clothes in time to music as it seduces my skin?

Stop being me?

Jesse is outraged that Paul disapproves of her occupation, an attitude which seems hopelessly naive at best. Here is Jesse’s account of the latter stages of one of her strips:

Dropping to the floor, I crawled my way to the tip rail, my body undulating to the guitar lead. Tits-first, I said hello to all the lovely men with their lovely money. Ones and fives slid next to my hip, thick fingers lingering on my thigh after they tucked the bills into my barely-there underwear. The new owner of my shorts offered me a twenty. Smiling over my shoulder, I showed him my ass…

I found it difficult to reconcile the Jesse who talks about Paul as her true love and her ‘White Knight’ with the Jesse who can’t keep her hands off any other man who crosses her path and who gets a thrill out of performing sexually for other men for money. This sort of set-up might have worked for me if this was an erotic romance where the sex scenes were driving the story but that’s not the case here. There is no ’sexual journey’ here - just Jesse consistently loving stripping throughout the book and Paul being consistently unhappy about it. And it doesn’t help that Jesse gets all White Picket Fence about Paul whenever she isn’t lap-dancing or drooling over some other bloke. It just didn’t add up for me.

The other thing that bothered me about Jesse was her attitude to her former existence as a demon. It was clear that Jesse thought of herself as an evil entity before her change to a human (although, to be fair, there is some dubiety about how evil she may really have been). Nevertheless, her cheerful nostalgia about eating human flesh, being bathed in blood and listening to the terrified screams of the damned, undermined - for me - the later attempts to establish her true ‘goodness’ when she tried to sacrifice herself for Paul. Don’t get me wrong, I realize that this is a comedy but it is also a romance and that means that Jesse has to convince not only as smart talking ex-demon (which she did) but also as a romantic heroine (which, in my view, she did not).

The Hero

I’m afraid Paul was the weakest part of the book for me. He was terribly bland. I couldn’t imagine how this quiet, rather dull man had managed to steal Jesse’s heart (though it did perhaps explain her preoccupation with overweight handymen). Throughout the book, Daun refers to Paul variously as ‘Shoulders’, ‘your meat pie’ and ‘your flesh puppet’ and he seemed to have the right of it. Paul was a handsome cardboard cut out.

The World-building

Kessler has created an all-inclusive pantheistic version of Hell, largely peopled by biblical characters and various gods and creatures from classical antiquity. I liked her descriptions of Hell and its various terrors - all very vivid and highly colored stuff with some genuinely creepy parts (the Eternal Caverns stands out as particularly nightmarish). But I was pretty muddled about how it all hung together and, at times, unavoidably, the book stumbled into bigger, religious questions about the nature of God and so on, that seemed to be too large for its limited, comic canvas.

The Verdict

Despite everything, I may pick up the next book, about Daun because I loved the character of Angel (and I’m assuming Daun’s going to end up with Angel?) but my real hope is that Kessler will write something else more to my personal taste - because I did rate her writing.

Grade C - for the nice prose.

This entry was posted on Tuesday, July 1st, 2008 at 4:43 am and is filed under Books, Grade: C, Sci-Fi/Fantasy, Suspense/Horror, Tumperkin's Reviews. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.