The Felix Castor Series

Initially, to open this article, I had a long and freewheeling description of the evolution of the Hellblazer comic series, its lead character John Constantine, and the process that led to the books that this review is about. It was kind of fun to write, but it was also strictly unnecessary. So let us dispense with the rigamarole: there’s some comics about a blue-collar British magician in a trenchcoat. One of the writers who worked on that comic series had lots more story ideas, so he invented his own blue-collar British magician in a trenchcoat (as many others have done since Hellblazer began in the late 80s) and started writing books about him.

The author is Mike Carey (also of the excellent but occasionally impenetrable Sandman spinoff Lucifer and several good runs on X-Men), and the character is Felix Castor, a London-based exorcist-for-hire in a time where that skill set is in high demand. You see, sometime getting close to the turn of the millenium, the dead started rising. Some as ghosts, some as zombies (which are just ghosts who won’t leave their old flesh), and some as werewolves or local equivalent (ghosts that have found new and interesting flesh). This troubles the hell out of most people. Hence, the demand for a good exorcist.

Felix, “Fix” to his friends (whenever he manages to get some) is a good exorcist, with a natural sense for the unique feel of each unquiet spirit (more on this later). Unfortunately, he’s pretty crappy at everything else – an unemployable smartass with a bone-deep aversion to consequences, a hapless romantic doing a poor imitation of a cynical lothario, and a friend who will have your back nine times out of ten but always manages to be in serious trouble somewhere when it’s the tenth time and you really need him. Basically, Fix is kind of a loser, and that makes him a fantastic narrator.

Through his world-weary eyes and quippy interior monologue, the reader of The Devil You Know and its sequels experiences a London that’s oddly prosaic in the face of a decade-plus of the living dead. It makes sense, if you accept the worldview people can get used to just about anything, and it’s a nice storytelling conceit; with the rise of mysticism being a recent event, Mr. Carey doesn’t have to turn his hand to rewriting history or tackling conspiracy theories. He also takes the opportunity to flesh out the natural human reactions to this sort of thing, with Felix musing about the issues of undead property & inheritance rights (“Turns out, you can take it with you”) and encountering the Breath of Life movement, or Breathers, a political activism group that targets exorcists for committing crimes against the unliving.

Against this backdrop, Fix starts off Devil by taking a bog-standard exorcism case that, of course, turns out far wilder than expected. This is a bit of a pattern throughout the books, but it’s delivered well enough to avoid getting ham-fisted or overly predictable, with the conceit of “exorcist for hire” mined for quite a few rich nuggets. There’s a greater plot in place, regarding the demonic legions of Hell and all that good stuff, that starts to become evident at the end of the first book. It dances in and out of the sequels, steadily growing in scope and relevance, and it’s that meta-plot that is responsible for some of the series’ creepiest, most harrowing moments and a couple crashing revelations that, like the answers to all good mysteries, seem thunderingly obvious in retrospect. (I didn’t guess ‘em, myself.)

But while that meta-plot is looming ominously in the background, Felix Castor has bills to pay. So he goes to exorcise a ghost from a lending library, or track down a little girl whose parents miss her regardless of her incorporeal state, or assist another exorcist with a bizarre haunting. Ancient conspiracies and new schemes swirl in the midst of it, and time and again, Mr. Carey finds new and interesting ways to get his protagonist caught between three rocks and five hard places, all of whom he’s managed to anger or disappoint, with nothing to get him out of it but his wits and tin whistle. (He uses it for exorcisms. I won’t attempt to describe it; the books do a better job.)

Throughout his misadventures, Fix is supported by his long-suffering landlady Pen, an old friend and pagan in the crystals-and-mistletoe mode; the two of them share an old guilt over mutual friend Rafi, a formerly adventurous soul now taking up space in an insane asylum for complicated reasons. He relies time and again on Nicky Heath, a zombified conspiracy theorist whose death mostly just made him more convinced that they had been out to get him all along, and on Inspector Gary Coldwood, a hard-bitten London detective who makes me wish I knew more about British policemen so I could tell when he’s meant to be kidding.

There’s also a wide cast of fellow exorcists, who recur to help or hinder Fix in turns, a freakshow united by the undeniable fact that they’re all basically unemployable losers. Nobody who spends their working hours dealing with dead people is really well-adjusted. One of those exorcists in particular is hard to discuss since her presence is kind of a huge spoiler for certain events, but rest assured that she is a fascinating character who sheds a great deal of light on the mysteries behind the curtain and is, in her unique nature, entirely convincing.

Of the five books out thus far, the fourth, Thicker Than Blood, may be overall the weakest, with a dive into Felix’s backstory and childhood that is better designed than it is executed. (It also features Mr. Carey’s most shameless robbery of Hellblazer, but then, he wrote the damn comic, so it’s more just recycling.) The book ends with a rattling bang, though, and sets off the tremendously strong The Naming of the Beasts, which sets up a sixth book that is currently in development and planned to end the story. (So don’t worry, this isn’t another wallet-eating Dresden Files.) Perhaps the weakness of Thicker is that of all the books thus far, it strays the furthest from Mr. Carey’s living, breathing, well-researched London. Like Fix and John Constantine, Mike Carey’s a Liverpool native who moved to London, and his love for and knowledge of his adopted city shines through, with an occasionally exhausting attention to detail justified by the sheer immersion of it all.

What makes the little underworld Mr. Carey’s crafted so believable, and lifts the Castor books above many other urban fantasy serials, is the sheer banality of much of it. Yeah, Fix is a wizard with a tin whistle, who charms demons, banishes werewolves, and goes toe-to-toe (or at least knee-to-groin) with Vatican-conspiracy assassins, but he’s also a hapless yutz, behind on his rent to the point where he finds himself performing sleight of hand at childrens’ birthday parties to make ends meet. And then he fucks it up, through a combination of good intentions and bad ideas. Like an underfed Batman with a dead cell phone, Felix Castor is the hero his people deserve; not much of a one, but he gets the job done.