But how many people do you know who actually get to choose what they do for a living? My careers teacher said I should go into hotel management, so exorcism it was. [p. 27]
Freelance exorcist Felix Castor has been avoiding exorcisms since one went horribly wrong, but the bills are piling up and his amiable landlady Pen is at risk of losing her house. Felix is taking 'ordinary' jobs to make ends meet, but his most recent booking, as a stage magician at a spoilt teenager's party, did not end well. When he receives a request to exorcise the ghost of a young woman who's haunting an archive in Euston, Felix -- Fix to his friends, of whom he has few -- decides it might solve his immediate difficulties.
Exorcism isn't just a job, though: it's a vocation. Fix has been seeing ghosts since he was a small child, and is extremely good at banishing them by playing tunes on his tin whistle. He doesn't know where they go when they're gone -- 'wherever music goes when it's not being played' -- and we get the sense that until now he hasn't really considered the ghosts as anything other than a nuisance to the living. But the young woman haunting the Archive is another matter, and as Fix discovers more of her story (and incidentally irritates or alienates almost every living human at the Archive) he starts to question his own role in her silencing. Is he pest control, or a rehoming agent?
I liked this vision of London, some time in the early years of the third millennium, busy with ghosts and were-folk and demons. It's still very much London, but these days people check whether it's a full moon before going out after dark, and religious types (like Fix's brother) are certain the apocalypse is nigh. There are tantalising fragments of world-building (which I'm sure are expanded in later volumes) and of Fix's own past. And there is a work-experience demon, Juliet, who has the marks of an intriguing recurring character.
There are four more Felix Castor books: I'll likely read more, not least to follow up the various sub-plots introduced in this volume.
Read for Lockdown Book Club.
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