[Bad Magic] by [[Stephan Zielinski]] has some very amusing moments. If you like witty gritty urban fantasy, you might like this..... it's a bit too zippy and clever for my taste, so I'm not going to run out and look for his next book, but I was amused and engaged enough to finish it just in case it shifted gears. I read it for moments like this one...... "Whitlomb gets up, his face twisted into rage. "You son of a bitch. Do you know that you staked the man who translated Gravity's Rainbow into Latin - on a bet?" And slams the butt of his shotgun into Tinridge's jaw." The appendix might be the funniest thing, although it has nothing to do with the book as far as I can tell, a 'scholarly paper' about Zombie Diego, a form of the undead virtually indistinguishable from H. Sapiens...... Truthfully though, I don't think this is a book to spend more than a day or so reading..... *** ( )

Magic and supernatural creatures are real, and amongst us. We don’t see them because we willfully blind ourselves to them, mainly to preserve our sanity. Bad Magic tells the story of an underground cell of mages in San Francisco determined to root out those forms of magical creatures that consider humans as walking lunches. They are an opposition task force. As the cell goes about their normal protection of humanity, they discover that San Francisco is the target of the vulture cult, a group that survives on human misery and anger and who will bring down the world if they can feed their god. This is a weird, novel brimming with cool and silly ideas (werejaguars, a nature magician that uses a clam as her totem, pseudo-vampires convinced they are the secret rulers of the world, etc…). The pace is frenetic; not much down time here. Complicating matters in the already difficult fight is that the cell members really don’t get along but they’re forced to live together as the vulture cult besieges them.

The writing isn’t the best, but this is the author’s first novel, so some of it can be forgiven. Zielinski throws in a couple of extraneous side items to either show us what cool ideas he has or pad the novel, I’m not quite sure. For science fiction or fantasy fans, this is a damn fun read with lots of action, obscure references, and a tongue-in-cheek sense of storytelling. . ( )

Open your third eye. Gaze around you. The wicked Incumbents are spreading their totemic power through elemental forces, alchemy, demonology, and bullets. The new hard currency of this post-Buffy universe is raw pain, and here it is stored (ready for sale or trade) frozen in cryogenic flasks. Ordinary folks are blissfully unaware of what's really happening in the world, because their many encounters with the weirdness of dark or light magic spells are instantly blanked from all living human memory. Nothing is exactly what it seems; no wonder everything's so badly screwed up...
Though a bit difficult to keep track of who's who amongst the champions as BAD MAGIC has eight heroic protagonists, each is eccentric in their own way. Stephen Zielinski's debut novel is an edgy roller coaster ride of thrills and chills as the classic confrontation between good and evil plays out with no guarantees as to whom will triumph. There is plenty of humor as the heroes and the author looks at the upcoming altercation with a tongue in cheek attitude that makes for even more fun reading.

Fantastically good: One of our favorites: fast, funny, over-the-top weird, and lots of fun. We keep only our favorites among the many novels we read (one of us has read over 10,000 fantasy and science fiction novels so far, the other over 2,000), and we both own Bad Magic. Highly recommended.