Review: There Be Demons

There Be Demons by M.K. Theodoratus
My rating: 3 of 5 stars

There Be Demons by M.K. Theodoratus is one of those books I was drawn to due to the lack of information received by the synopsis. There was enough to leave me intrigued, but not enough to leave me able to predict how the story would play out. In other words, the possibilities this book had pulled me in.

With any book that contains demons, I found myself expecting a rather dark book. Whenever I read ‘demons’ I always hope for the darker Supernatural episodes, those where everything that could goes wrong does go wrong. What I often forget, as I did with this book, is that the level of demonic darkness I expect does not occur within young adult urban fantasy books. Thus, what I received wasn’t quite what I had been hoping for when I read the synopsis. It was a fun book, I cannot deny that, but it had a few too many of the standard young adult fantasy elements for me to be truly blown away by it.

The premise of the story was really interesting, with there being plenty of elements throughout that I found myself really enjoying. There are plenty of books that cover the battle between angels and demons, but I have read few books where we have gargoyles. It was a nice change to the usual, and I instantly found myself intrigued by this element of the story. It was something different, and I always enjoy something different. However, I do feel as though I never did learn as much about the gargoyles as I had hoped to. There were many times where we found stuff out about the specific gargoyles, but I would have liked a little bit more information about them as a collective, thus allowing me to see a much bigger picture of the unique element of the story.

What I really wanted more of, though, was big action scenes. A lot of the book is spent upon the characters developing into their roles, coming to terms with the situation, and I feel as though this was at the expense of what could have been many big action scenes. In many ways, I feel as though this book contained too much. There was plenty to enjoy, but I felt as though many elements were put into one book when it would have worked better had things been spread out across a couple of books. Even if it were duology, whereby the first book contained all the coming to terms with the situation that was included in this book and the second book focused much more on the taking down the bad guy. As someone who really enjoys to coming together of the big bad in books, I felt a little bit disappointed when the book gave us so much more when it came to the everyday conflict of the characters.

Don’t get me wrong, this was an enjoyable enough read, I simply believe I was in the wrong mindset to really appreciate it. I’ve been having a bit of an off period with young adult books recently, and I believe this is just another example of how I’m not in the right place to enjoy young adult, as I know many will really enjoy this.

For those who enjoy young adult books with a demonic twist, I’d certainly recommend giving this book a read.

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