Wherein I praise Gloria Weber's Gaslight Demons

December 13, 2009 1 comment

First, thank you to Morbidgames for including the following at the bottom of the first page: “Notice to Copier & Printer Services MORBIDGAMES PUBLISHING allows for the owner of this PDF to print one color copy and one black and white copy for personal non-commercial use.” If more PDF publishers did this, it would save me a tremendous amount of grief.

Gaslight Demons isn’t a game, but a fantasy novel by Gloria Weber. Gloria’s done roleplaying game work before, notably on two games that I did but you probably haven’t heard of: Helix: The Post Apocalypse, High-Tech, Fantasy, Western Role Playing Game (written by her husband Adam, with contributions by Gloria and others) and Moirai, a lite universal system that uses a “fate ball” (you know, looks like a billiard ball, has a number on it?) instead of dice. Given that I like other things she’s touched, I agreed to give it a read when I was offered a review copy. The one drawback was that I absolutely loathe long PDFs. I hate reading long works on screen. Makes me crazy. I’m all about old school dead trees in my hand. That Gaslight Demons drew me in and kept me reading in spite of my dislike of the medium says something positive about the book.

The story is about Sophia Nogard, a “Occult Officer” in a pseudo-Victorian fantasy world where magic exists. She polices the use of magic, including fighting supernatural monsters. She herself (and this isn’t really a spoiler, it’s in the prologue) is the result of an illegal magical experiment, but you don’t learn what the exactly means right off the bat. She gets saddled with a new partner. They have to solve a mystery. It’s like Law & Order meets Harry Potter. It’s just bizarre genre blending, and I like that. The characters are likable, the plot moves at a good clip, and I had a good time. A worthwhile read. I want to see a roleplaying setting based on it, so I can play in this world.

The only criticism I have to level at Gaslight Demons is that it could have benefited from tighter editing. I’d occasionally hit a sentence that would just… read strangely. No typos that I caught, just phrasing and word choices that seemed quirky, and not in a “worldbuilding through vocabulary” sort of way. These are the sorts of things I don’t blame writers for, and are why editors exist. Gloria is definitely a talented, up-and-coming writer, and I think she’s got the potential to have her work on bookshelves next to people like Simon R. Green and Jim Butcher.