The Witchstone by Henry H. Neff – Review

Published: June 18, 2024

Publisher: Blackstone Publishing, Inc

Series: N/A

Genre: Fantasy

Pages: 549 (Kindle)

My Rating: 4.5 Stars

A copy of this book was provided by the publisher in exchange for an honest review.

Synopsis:
An unforgettable, high-stakes, laugh-out-loud funny novel, The Witchstone blends the merciless humor of The Good Place with the spellbinding fantasy of Neil Gaiman’s American Gods.

Meet Laszlo, eight-hundred-year-old demon and Hell’s least productive Curse Keeper. From his office beneath Midtown, he oversees the Drakeford Curse, which involves a pathetic family upstate and a mysterious black stone. It’s a sexy enough assignment—colonial origins, mutating victims, et cetera—but Laszlo has no interest in maximizing the curse’s potential; he’d rather sunbathe in Ibiza, quaff martinis, and hustle the hustlers on Manhattan’s subway. Unfortunately, his division has new management, and Laszlo’s ratings are so abysmal that he’s given six days to shape up or he’ll be melted down and returned to the Primordial Ooze.

Meet Maggie Drakeford, nineteen-year-old Curse Bearer. All she’s ever known is the dreary corner of the Catskills where the Drakeford Curse has devoured her father’s humanity and is rapidly laying claim to her own. The future looks hopeless, until Laszlo appears at the Drakeford farmhouse one October night and informs them that they have six days—and six days only—to break the spell before it becomes permanent. Can Maggie trust the glib and handsome Laszlo? Of course not. But she also can’t pass up an opportunity to save her family, even if it means having a demon as a guide …

Thus begins a breakneck international adventure that takes our unlikely duo from a hot dog stand in Central Park to the mountains of Liechtenstein, a five-star hotel in Zurich, and even the time-traveling vault of a demonic crime boss. As the clock ticks down, tough-as-nails Maggie and conniving Laszlo will uncover a secret so profound that what began as a farcical quest to break a curse will eventually threaten the very Lords of HelL

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You know, sometimes I forget how much I like a good demonic contemporary fantasy. It’s not really a heaven vs. hell thing like Good Omens, but a pact with the devil (or demon) gone wrong can be so entertaining. It’s even better when the demon is a bit of a git.

Speaking of gits, our demon of the hour is Laszlo. He’s gotten to the lowly rank of a Tier 3 demon working as a Curse Keeper purely through the power of nepotism. All that comes crashing down as a much higher ranking demon called an Overseer shows up to audit his job performance and finds him lacking. Rather than going straight into the sludge-machine, Laszlo’s parentage gets him six days to generate some misery and despair from the cursed Drakeford family.

The Drakefords are a miserable bunch with a miserable lot in life. They live in a small town in the Catskills where they act as the village sin-eaters, paid in cash and a cruel peppering of stones for their services. The Drakeford curse goes back centuries to when a Drakeford interrupted a witch’s ritual and burned her at the stake. As she died, she cursed the Drakeford line to complete the spell that was interrupted and until then each Drakeford reaches a certain age and begins to slowly deform into a monstrous figure. Maggie, it seems, has begun that horrid transformation even earlier than her father did, so when Laszlo shows up on her front porch promising help in breaking the curse she’s… well, she’s skeptical. I can’t blame her – handsome guy shows up claiming to be a demon there to help break a curse that’s gone on for centuries? Yeah, right.

Anyway, to the reader and the Drakefords it’s clear that Laszlo has something up his sleeve, but at some point I began to wonder if he was really trying to do the right thing (skeptical) while still trying to save his own skin. Laszlo is basically an expert in all the self-serving sins du jour. He’ll steal, lie, cheat, gluttonously quaff large chocolate milkshakes, and in general, live for the finer things in life. His journey with the Drakefords across New York City, Liechtenstein, and Rome is quite the adventure and he’s trying to live his best life for the next six days while also achieving his nefarious goals.

The Drakefords themselves – specifically Maggie and her younger brother Lump (George) – are a tough, determined bunch and I couldn’t help but to love them. Maggie just wants a proper life for herself and now that she has even an inkling of a chance, she’s damn well going to try to fix things. Lump is an incredibly intelligent but sheltered kid with a newfound addiction to soda. He’s hard not to love, especially as the story progresses. 

The Witchstone definitely took me by surprise with its quality storytelling. It’s darkly humorous and really kept me on my toes because Laszlo, Maggie, and Lump were always on the brink of peril. Considering Laszlo is such a self-indulgent demon and has an unsurprisingly irreverent sense of humor (he refers to Bill Drakeford as a human sloppy joe) he’s actually good. The Witchstone has a ton of heart, plenty of action, and a hell of a finale, so I’d definitely recommend it especially for those who may have read and enjoyed Claudia Lux’s Sign Here.