Bad Magic by Stephan Zielinski

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The Barnes & Noble Review
If H. P. Lovecraft and Terry Pratchett had an illegitimate love child, it would be Stephan Zielinski. The novelist's brilliantly bizarre debut novel, Bad Magic -- which pits an eccentric band of alchemists, shamans, and sorcerers against an ancient evil -- features revenant pit bulls, vampiric cultists, were-jaguars, flying houses, and a wide array of Jedi mind tricks!

When an underground cell of supernaturally gifted misfits dedicated to fighting the unseen evil forces in the world uncovers a cult bent on taking over San Francisco, a preternatural battle is started that puts millions of innocent lives in jeopardy. The goal of the mysterious Vulture cult is simple: "Find the weak and dying. Peck out their eyes. Feed." But when members of the cell -- which includes a synesthetic mage, a professor of archeology, a zombie dwarf, and a potty-mouthed lycanthrope -- catch cult members feeding on the terminally ill at an area hospice, the conflict that follows is both jaw-dropping and hair-raising.

To say that writing highly intelligent, laugh-out-loud fantasy is difficult would be an extreme understatement. Pratchett, Paul Di Filippo, Rudy Rucker, Andrew Fox -- there just aren't that many successful authors out there who have mastered the subgenre. Zielinski's Bad Magic is one of those rare books written with razor-sharp wit that is as funny as it is disturbing. During the course of the novel, readers will undoubtedly be questioning Zielinski's sanity; but regardless of his mental well-being, one thing is certain: Bad Magic is pure literary genius. Paul Goat Allen

From the Publisher

Magic is real. Strange forces and uncanny creatures abound. Cosmic evil is loose in the world--especially around San Diego--along with transcendent evil, primordial evil, simmering evil, objective evil, and specific evil.

In sheer self-defense, most of the human race long ago taught themselves to shut their magical Third Eye, blinding themselves to this supernatural world around them. As protection goes, it's not 100% effective, but it's still pretty good: If you can't see them, they can't see you.

Fortunately for the rest of us, a few people can deal with the weirdness. In San Francisco, a motley group of adventurers have banded together to fight evil. They're an uncanny mix of alchemists, thaumaturges, necromancers, and totemists, working their wildly different magics in a milieu where thaumaturgy is a laboratory science and raw pain can be kept in a flask of liquid nitrogen. They know they don't know what they're doing. And they have to save a world that doesn't know it's under attack from forces that they wish were beyond comprehension.

Poised, headspinning, and richly inventive, Bad Magic shows us what people really see when their third eye opens.

Publishers Weekly

As in the movie Men in Black, most people are mercifully unaware of the horrors that surround them in first-time author Zielinski's wacky occult fantasy. It's up to Al Rider and his cohorts, who operate out of San Francisco and are aware of and willing to use their third eye, to confront vampires, ghosts, zombies, zombie dogs (not to be confused with thin dogs) and a host of other undead creatures anxious to take over the world. While the humor is often scattershot and undisciplined, the author shows some genuine wit. One redundant, rapid-fire dialogue exchange could have been taken from Joseph Heller's Catch 22. When the heroes run on water, they do the "Sea of Galilee boogie." A recipe for preparing thin dog dinner makes a deliciously gruesome aside. But Zielinski doesn't play it strictly for laughs. At the start, Rider steals "invisibility" from a homeless woman for use as a cloak. "It will crumble at sunrise; the street person is, in part, defined by her invisibility, and so it must return to her." An appendix features a windy treatise, full of scholarly references, by a Miskatonic University professor. The final item, "the author's top ten rejected bio blurbs," will provoke more than a few smiles. (Dec. 1) Copyright 2004 Reed Business Information.

Kirkus Reviews

A task force known as the Opposition resists an onslaught of zombies and vampires and their kith and kin in Zielinski's engagingly insane first novel. When an attack of "reanimated" canines confirms the group's fears that "there are monsters and demons and undead all around," a "journeyman synesthetic mage" named Al Rider assembles his seven cohorts to check out the approaching menace. The Opposition includes miscellaneous alchemists, thaumaturges, and other magicians-among them potty-mouthed witch Maggie-Sue, "occult medic" Chloe, phlegmatic German biker Kristof Arbeiter, sinister voudon Creedon Thibaud, white-haired black dwarf Joseph Washington, retired archaeology prof Pericles Whitlomb, and (comparatively ordinary) computer security specialist Max Sturgeon. All possess some paranormal abilities, including a "third eye" that enables them to perceive the monsters Out There that the rest of us can't (or won't) see. Crises multiply: from strange occurrences in a hospital ward to a battle with the male chauvinist San Diego Navy, a trip to an Amazonian rain forest to bring back a live jaguar (whose blood is needed for a particularly potent incantation), and a face-off with the Vulture Cult briefly employed by an emergent Adolph Hitler, and now committed to await "the night the border between the worlds weakens. . . [and establish] an empire of the undead." There's dissension in the Opposition's ranks (Rider is suspected of being a double, perhaps a triple agent), and a lot of angry bantering, but the eight get their act together just in time, as Armageddon comes to San Francisco Bay. Bad Magic is fun for a while, but Zielinski overworks the gags, and ends the novel-most unwisely-with anunconscionably prolix Appendix that overexplains relevant occultism and arcana. On the other hand, how not to admire an archvillain who confesses, "I want to rule the world. It's a hobby of mine."

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