Review: Death's Daughter by Amber Benson

Blurb:

DADDY'S LITTLE GIRL

For the last few years I'd been in a state of bliss--living under a self-imposed Forgetting Charm, because I so did not want to go into the family business. What I wanted was a glamorous career in New York City and the opportunity for a normal life--buying designer shoes on sale, dating guys from craigslist, Web surfing for organic dim sum for my boss. And then my father's Executive Assistant, a faun named Jarvis, showed up to tell me that my dad has been kidnapped.

Good-bye Forgetting Charm. Hell, (unwanted) responsibility. Not only am I expected to step into the CEO slot on the company Board, but I have to "prove my worth" by competing against the Devil's protégé--who so hot in more ways than one. The contest involves finding three (why is it always three?) objects of power. In Hell.

One of them is this adorable puppy--who happens to be a hellhound. The others are turning out to be not much fun. All this so I can take (unwanted) charge of Death, Inc.

My name is Calliope Reaper-Jones, and I'm...Death's Daughter.

Review:

So one of mine and my wife’s favorite shows to re-binge is Buffy the Vampire Slayer. In the fourth season, we’re introduced to a character named Tara, played by Amber Benson. I’ve not really had any interaction with the Buffy fandom at large, but it’s my understanding that Tara is a fan favorite character; she certainly is in our house! For large portions of the seasons in which she’s present, Tara is seemingly the only character with a solid head on her shoulders, and one who’s selflessness and empathy towards the other characters make her - especially at times when the rest of the cast is behaving terribly - immeasurably endearing. Justice for Tara! 

Why does this matter? Well, I’ve made perusing the rabbit holes of Wikipedia and IMDb something of a hobby ever since I was first given access to a computer, and so I knew that Amber Benson had moved into the writers’ sphere since Buffy’s conclusion in 2003 - but I wasn’t aware (or had forgotten) that this pivot to writing included novels, at least not until I was wandering through our local Half Price Books and saw Death’s Daughter tucked away in the Science-fiction and Fantasy section. And so I grabbed it off the shelf and bought it; considering this artifact of Benson’s creative history with no shortage of curiosity. I love untangling the thread of an artist’s creative output and seeing how their work morphs over time - how old works influence future ones, and how their art was affected (if at all) by other contemporaneous works. And so I was excited to take this dip into Benson’s prose, having only really experienced her work as a performer on Buffy. How would the woman who played Tara write a fantasy novel?

And with that preface out of the way, let’s explore Death’s Daughter - first published in 2009. 

The premise is simple enough: Calliope (or “Callie”) Reaper-Jones is the daughter of, you guessed it, Death with a capital D. She has no interest in the family business, and has sequestered herself within the hustle and bustle of New York City, hoping to catch her big break into the glamorous world of high Fashion. To this end she’s even placed a Forgetting Charm on herself, to further wall herself off from her mystical heritage. But as with best-laid-plans, these ones were not to be. You see, someone has kidnapped her father (DEATH, you may recall), her oldest sister, and all the upper executives of Death Incorporated; leaving the mantle of Death to fall to the prodigal daughter Calliope. But it’s not quite so simple as that. She’ll need to complete three tasks to prove she’s capable of the title and responsibilities of Death, or else the Board of Death (there is a lot of business hierarchy in the underworld, apparently) will rescind all the privileges of Death from the Reaper-Jones family. That means no more wealth, no more powers, and most importantly no more immortality. Add to that the sticky wrinkle of knowing there is someone out there holding her father (DEATH!!!!) and her sister hostage, and you’ve got all the makings of a fascinating, fantasy thriller. 

But I’ll be honest, I found this book to be a bit challenging - in no small part because of the extremely referential nature of Benson’s descriptive prose. Though not quite as referential as something like Ernest Cline’s Ready Player One, Death’s Daughter has a lot of faith that you will know what the heck it is talking about at any given moment. The book might tell you that a character has a “penchant for Keith Richards’s old wardrobe” or that the voice of God sounds like RuPaul. I understand these things, but there were many others I didn’t; and there is little done to help the reader if these moments. You’ll just have to make a best guess, as I had to the handful of times I wasn’t compelled by curiosity to actually look up the reference in question (I now know who Mark Ryden is). 

And much as Buffy is an unmistakable artifact of the 1990s, Death’s Daughter is aggressively a child of the following decade - particularly in the design of dialogue and Calliope’s copious inner-monologuing. So if you do not hold any nostalgia for the texture of how Americans spoke to each other at the turn of the century, you might have trouble working through Death’s Daughter; but if you do yearn for that era of history, boy-howdy do I have a book for you. 

With these textural elements in mind, we can thus explore the greater narrative of Death’s Daughter. It is a kind of detective story, so I’ll do my best to avoid major plot details beyond those already outlined. While the characters and the dialogue of Death’s Daughter feel inextricably bound to the Buffy the Vampire Slayer school of character development, the grander plot feels far closer to something like Neil Gaiman’s American Gods. The supernatural elements of Buffy always towed a very specific line so as to not lean too heavily toward any specific religion; but Death’s Daughter, like American Gods, just dumps us into a polytheistic world wherein basically every god humans have ever worshiped actually exists. Callie meets the Goddess of Destruction Kali, Queen of the Underworld Persephone, the famed Norse god Odin (stylized in this text to “Wodin”), and even the God of the Bible (with, as mentioned, the voice of RuPaul. Jesus and Lucifer also get shouted out, though it is unclear if the “Devil” character in the text is the same Lucifer or just a successor to the mantle).

We’re whisked through many different worlds, New York City, Atlantis, Hades, Hell (these are two distinct sections of the afterlife, and the text has an interesting explanation as to why there are multiple destinations for Earth’s bad people), and other stygian depths beyond human comprehension; all in service of Callie’s quest to take on the Death mantle and figure out what exactly happened to her family and who took them. It was toward the middle of the book that I had a pretty good guess, and Benson does well to bread-crumb out clues and hints so that the reader can mind-palace-detective-cork-board-with-spiderwebs-of-red-string their way toward a possible solution.

But for what struggles I had making it to the final pages of Death’s Daughter, there were definitely highlights. Benson tricks you with the early chapters, settling you into a fantasy setting that - though dealing with macabre concepts like Death and Hell - feels mostly safe. Violence is sparse, and when it occurs it is not anything you might feel like needing to look away from. But then, there is a turn as the story advances, and Benson reveals that this world does hide true horrors just beneath its surface. The violence becomes more visceral and immediate. There are moments of body horror, brought about as Callie’s Deathly powers more tangibly manifest themselves; and the setting of the final showdown is… well, I won’t spoil it. 

So I would recommend this book, with reservations. I definitely don’t think this book is for everyone; but those of you who will click with it will click hard. And apparently there are five of these Calliope Reaper-Jones novels, so I’ll probably explore the next one if I can find a copy. 

I hope that doesn’t surprise you. Part of the reason I was excited to have the opportunity to write reviews for SFF Insiders was to give myself an excuse to be more diligent about reading, and push myself to read things I might not normally seek out. I think that - especially for those of us who consider ourselves storytellers - it’s important to take in as much storytelling as we can because there is always something we can learn from it. Famed film director and documentarian Werner Herzog put it this way: “The poet must not avert his eyes”. 

And so now, even when I’m not one-hundred percent on board with what a story is doing, as a byproduct of this effort to more conscientiously observe and interact with fiction, I will almost always end up being interested in - at the very least - seeing where the story goes; and the ongoing tales of Calliope Reaper-Jones are no exception. 

So if you are - like me - a mental historian of the works of artists you like, are interested in reading an fascinating anthropological artifact from the late 2000s (and all the good and bad that will entail), or are just in the mood for a chosen-one mystery narrative with intriguing fantasy elements, check out Death’s Daughter.