Slowly, slowly, she became again what she’d once been—not a being, but a current, a force, a spirit. She dissolved back into foam, heaving a sigh that salted the earth’s shore, driving gracelessly against bigger things; stronger things. With her secrets restored, she became again nothing; became, again, everything... [p. 347]
An estate agent is trying to sell a mansion in an up-market district of Chicago: except the estate agent is a vampire, and the house is haunted, and the ghost would like his murder solved, please. There are plenty of other supernatural beings -- 'creatures' -- around, including a siren, a werewolf, a demon, a reaper (a soldier in Lucifer's army), and a man named Brandt who claims to be a son of Odin. And there is Death's godson, more-or-less-fraudulent medium Fox d'Mora, who's still mourning a lover who left him nearly two centuries ago. That lover's return is tied in with the disappearance of Death himself, and with a game that the immortals play. There's only one rule: don't lose.
One of Blake's earliest novels, Masters of Death was first published in 2018, a couple of years before The Atlas Six. It does read like an early work and I'm surprised that Tor have republished it without any amendments. The prose is arch and melodramatic, which suits the story, but the plot is tangled and murky (I'm still not entirely clear on what the game involves: emotional torture via the evocation of memories?) and, aargh! the saidisms! Characters seldom say anything: they point out, or tell, or mutter, or comment, or agree, or argue, or return, or realize, or add, or judge, or conclude, or... When I find myself paying more attention to synonyms for speech than to the plot, the prose is a distraction.
There are some lovely passages, though, and some very likeable characters. Viola the estate agent, 'not the Dracula kind of vampire', is great: so is her friend, Isis, a demon who works as a personal trainer. And I do wish there was more about Brandt. If I'd read this first, I doubt I'd have gone on to The Atlas Six: but seeing the seeds of Blake's style was interesting.
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