#BookReview: Dark Day, Bright Hour, by Julie Frost

Dante with guns, explosions, and punching demons in the face.

If I were to lay money who was going to recreate the journey of Dante and Virgil through the levels of Hell, and then add handguns, rocket launchers, and using the power of faith to punch a Kaiju demon to death, I would have laid money that it would have been NR LaPoint. It’s very much his wheelhouse.

Nope. This time, the book I described belongs to “werewolf author” Julie Frost. I encountered Julie when we were in an anthology together (Venus, from Tuscany Bay Press, if you’re curious), which was so good I want the rest of the series. While at the recent LibertyCon, she mentioned Dark Day, Bright Hour, a book “Too Christian for most publishers, and too gritty for Christian publishers.”

Not that I would know anything about that. Heh.

The Story

Anthony is a hitman, killed by irony; he died trying to save a woman after her car went off a bridge. They both drowned, and now the two of them are in Hell … except she’s a parole officer and a virtuous woman who’s not supposed to be there. There’s been a clerical error. Her guardian angel is even at her side. Since no demon wants these two in the abyss, a crossroads demon named Derek is assigned to escort them through the inferno. Along the way, they’ve been tasked with recruiting for yet another rebellion, against Satan himself.

The resulting story is one part Dante’s Inferno with a touch of The Screwtape Letters. Just add guns that explode demons, enable the virtuous to beat up devils, and make Screwtape into middle management who hated everyone else in Hell.

First of all, this book Should Not Work. It is literally told from a rotating first person point of view. All four character get their chance to tell the story at certain legs of the trip. However, Julie Frost makes this work entirely because they have long stretches of narration.

It helps that the plot is constantly moving. Sometimes it moves a little too fast. Sometimes, the story doesn’t even wait a beat before the next damned (literally) thing falls out of the sky (or crawls out of the dirt, etc). As I said, the plot is pure Dante, where the story is an escort mission out of Hell, with a subplot of a recruitment mission, polling the demon kings of Hell to see who wants to overthrow Satan before he tries starting things with Heaven again. There are moments of comedy, again, like Screwtape, in seeing the various demon factions snipe at each other.

Overall, this was a fun ride that was part action, part comedy and just enough gonzo to make it a perfectly enjoyable cocktail. Yes, I probably killed that metaphor, but I’ve half awake as I write this.

The Characters

Anthony is a hitman who died saving someone else, but is in Hell anyway. He’s only a little confused, since he only killed people who had it coming. He also has an Ivy League degree and was born into the family business, and was just too lazy to get another job.

Freddi is the virtuous one, whose parole officer career was cut short by a car accident. She’s in Hell entirely by accident.

Zeeviel is a guardian angel, attached to Freddi’s side.

Derek is … pretty whiny as a demon. Like Tom Ellis’ Lucifer, one of his major character traits involves serious Daddy Issues. Also like the aforementioned Tom Ellis character, this personality trait is as boring as it is grating

Everybody here is fleshed out, with their own back stories and motivations. There’s almost enough character here to make it a character-driven story, but there are too many fireworks to make that characterization. And the character exploration is integrated so well into the plot, I really didn’t notice until I looked back over the story for this review. It was just that well done.

The World

It’s Hell. There’s not much to discuss.

Politics

Depends. Do you believe that a belief in God, or Hell, or redemption, is political, then this is political. Otherwise, no.

Content Warning

It’s … Hell. Everything you might have a problem with in Dante’s Inferno, you’re going to have here. Nudity. Torture. Violence. Probably some cussing, but I don’t recall. And a mercy killing that I’m not 100% certain makes sense in context.

The biggest issues you might have are theological. Some plot points require God to deliberately not be omniscient and takes “turns His face away” to mean that God means He ignores and allows Himself to be ignorant of something.

As I said, it’s required for the plot, and this is a line in the last ten pages, so it’s not that big a deal, unless you’re a mildly neurotic reader with a philosophy degree, like me.

Who is it for?

Take the total gonzo action of NR LaPoint (or any similarly pulpy author) writing Dante’s Inferno, only Hell is more like The Screwtape Letters.

Why buy it?

If you want to enjoy something that could be “Christian Fiction” but is too much fun to fit into that genre, you should be buying this book.