If Found, Return to Hell

by Em X Liu

Overview

Being an intern at One Wizard sounds magical on the page, but in practice mostly means getting yelled at by senior mages and angry clients who've been turned into platypuses alike. So when Journeyman Wen receives a frantic call from a young man who's awoken to a talisman on his bedroom wall and no memory of how it got there, they jump at the chance to escape call center duty and actually help someone for once.

But the case ends up being more complicated than Wen could ever have anticipated. Their client has been possessed by a demon prince from Hell, and he's not interested in leaving...

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9781786189929
Publisher:	Rebellion Publishing
Publication date:	06/15/2023
Pages:	162
Sales rank:	405,983
Product dimensions:	5.06(w) x 7.81(h) x 0.37(d)

Editorial Reviews

04/17/2023

Liu’s bumpy, Kafkaesque debut contemporary fantasy kicks off when Wen Mingyan, a despairing, burned-out intern at One Wizard, a mystical insurance company, gets a mysterious call from client Shine Meng Junlei, who claims he blacked out and woke up to discover a mysterious talisman on the wall of his room. Leaping at a chance to get off phone duty, Mingyan agrees to investigate. They discover that Shine has been possessed by Wang Ran, a demon prince who refuses to leave his fun new body and face his terrifying father, King Death. Though this is above Mingyan’s pay grade, they unwisely promise to help and are sucked into a power struggle full of demons, grim reapers, and contractual obligations. Unfortunately, the growing intimacy between Mingyan and Shine/Wang Ran feels both elided over and forced by the needs of the plot, rather than arising naturally out of character. Those who enjoy non-European SFF settings and second person POV will want to check this out, but others will find that it skips a few too many steps to get to the now well-explored point that capitalist bureaucracy is the real hell. Agent: Penelope Burns, Gelfman Schneider. (June)

Publishers Weekly

Nicky Endres delivers this urban fantasy, making it sound like they are speaking directly to the listener. Magic has been monetized--with strict legal requirements and the call-center corporation One Wizard filtering all magical requests. Journeyman Wen is burned out from fielding angry customer calls and appeasing senior mages. But when a frantic call from a young man who is way over his head comes though, an opportunity to actually help people arises. The robotic and painfully slow tone Endres uses for most of the narration works only during the call-center scenes. However, they shine when performing dialogue, especially in their ability to give androgynous voices to this queer cast. S.S. © AudioFile 2024, Portland, Maine

JANUARY 2024 - AudioFile