Ghost Fixer

The Devil You Know by Mike Carey (F CAR Main)
Reviewed by Jeanne

Felix Castor—Fix, to his friends—makes his living as a freelance exorcist in London. It’s not an easy living, though not for lack of spirits: some years earlier the dead started showing up in vast quantities for no reason anyone can tell. Ghosts, zombies, and. . . things. . . abound. Most are harmless, just lost souls or perhaps parts of souls. “Ghosts are reflections in fun-house mirrors,” Fix tells us, “distorted echoes of past emotions, lingering on way past their sell-by date.” They’re not really sentient, though sometimes they can give a sort of response from whatever shred of consciousness remains and usually they’re harmless. Still plenty scary, though.

Anyway, after a near disaster, Fix retired from the ghostbusting business. Unfortunately, there’s the little matter of rent past due, food to buy, all the things that affect the living. As the book begins, he’s so desperate that he’s willing to try a gig as a magician at a child’s birthday party.

It’s not a pretty sight.

So Fix reluctantly takes a call about a recent haunting at the Bonnington Archive. A veiled female ghost has been haunting the premises for about a month without incident, but now has turned violent. All Fix has to do is get rid of her.

But to do this, he has to have a sense of the ghost: who she is, why she’s there. That’s the way Fix’s brand of exorcism works. Like the Pied Piper, Fix catches a ghost with music, weaving a tune on his tin whistle that is the essence of the spirit, calling and entrapping it before sending it to. . . wherever.

Fix is more a British Sam Spade than Indiana Jones; there’s a sorrow about him, a hint of weariness, but he’s a decent human being. The supporting characters are also well developed, particularly Nicky, the conspiracy theorist who is obsessive about keeping a very low profile lest someone track him down. Nicky is also dead, but he doesn’t let that stand in his way. He just keeps the air conditioning turned way up high.

The plot, while fantasy, also harkens back to the hardboiled detective tradition. There’s a very real mystery to be solved in the middle of the supernatural shenanigans and Carey keeps the motives very human. Unlike some fantasy works, there’s no pat explanation for everything. At this point, no one knows why the dead suddenly became active; Fix wonders about it, and wonders uneasily where the spirits he sends away are going.

The gloomy London setting, with its gray skies and ghosts, the dark and maze-like Bonnington Archive and Fix’s own rather dank apartment give the book a definite sense of atmosphere and mood. It’s almost like a ghostly presence itself, a miasma of fog and spirit, that lingers in the air after the book is shut. Carey also knows the value of showing rather than telling, so that there are scenes that linger in the mind and emotions. For me, THE scene of the book is when Fix sees a young woman watching a group of small children. A bit closer and he realizes she’s one of “the returned,” a zombie. She’s still waiting for the children, she tells him. She told them she’d be here when they got back. But there was a car. They didn’t get the number. And she goes back to her waiting.

That sent a genuine shiver up my spine.

Don’t think it’s all gloom and doom, though. The book is atmospheric, not depressing. There’s a good deal of understated humor and Fix himself has enough bon mots that I should have been taking notes. (One personal favorite: “Clearly, this was a man who recognized the importance of good diet, regular exercise, and unremitting moral superiority.”)

There’s a satisfying ending with a zingy twist, enough intriguing hints about things in Fix’s past that still haunt him (literally and figuratively) and likeable characters to make me quite ready for another visit with Fix and friends. Luckily for me, there are four more books in the series.

And I really want my own tin whistle. (Sadly, I have a tin ear already.)

Mike Carey is an award-winning writer of comics and graphic novels who lives in London.