Black Magic Woman

There are some people who can write about the mundane and trivial, and make it new again: who can bring forth wonder and awe from the quotidian details of everyday life, and conjure an Oz out of Kansas.

And then, on the other hand, there are people who can write about the fantastic, and in so doing make it as dull and banal as a plastic knife from McDonald's.

Black Magic Woman is a novel by Justin Gustainis, first published in 2008. It is also very much a plastic knife from McDonald's.

The setting is a suspension-of-disbelief-breakingly near-real present-day United States of America, in which a) magic works, and witches both white and black (the distinction is presented as fundamental) can be found for hire, but nonetheless b) virtually nobody believes in magic, because they forget about it and/or rationalize it away. (Except only sometimes.) Magic in this setting sems to work in a vague way that I can either describe clinically as 'Post-Vietnam American New-Age Christian Pansyncretic', or more viciously as 'letting unexamined detritus build up in your faith hole'.

The main characters, on the other hand, have no character at all, but read like character sheets out of a World of Darkness game: Quincey Morris, a great-grandson of Quincey Morris (late of Stoker's Dracula), lightly colored caricature-Texan ('podner'?) with a fear of snakes, and Elizabeth 'Libby' Chastain, the most Christian-inoffensive bisexual Wiccan possible.

(The secondary main characters, Fenton and Van Dreenan, at least have personalities: but Fenton's the one who seems to accept the existence of magic on hearsay whereas poor Sidney Prendergast never again questions how she got off the roof of that building — never mind the poor forensic analysts who have to clean up after a bit of black magic. I suppose Fenton's shining blue PC aura protects him from sudden sense failure.)

The actual events of the book are vaguely interesting but fail to make up for the irritation induced by the people and world. 1/1, and good riddance.

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Edit 2009-05-17: removed a now-confusing footnote left over from an early draft.