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Hello and welcome! My name is Emma (I write fantasy under the name E. M. Epps). This blog features my Two-Paragraph Book Reviews. One paragraph from me. One from the book. Here's why I keep it short.

You are here: Home > Review: “The Necromancer’s House” by Christopher Buehlman

Review: “The Necromancer’s House” by Christopher Buehlman

Image Emma 8 May 2017

Thumbs up for The Necromancer’s House by Christopher Buehlman. Horror/fantasy.

This is a messy book, but messy in a pleasing way: if magic were real, you can believe it would be this. A magician and his apprentice, who met in Alcoholics Anonymous. (They love each other, but she’s a lesbian; awkward.) The magician has a boobytrapped house, a bunch of Russian spell books, a wicker butler with the heart of a collie and the head of a Salvador Dali painting, and a very good reason to have a boobytrapped house. Bad things happen, and it is extremely satisfying. If you enjoy literary fantasy set in a realistic modern day that is not “urban fantasy,” check it out. (Also, a great pairing for this book, in both style and content, would be Toby Barlow’s Babayaga.)

That was the point of the three-month-long spell he wove around [his house], burying mirror shards and the dried skins of chameleons in a circle, painting the walls with paint he’d hidden in public for a month and added octopus ink to, intoning both the Iliad and the Odyssey in Homer’s Greek to provoke benign blindness in those who climbed the hill and looked at the house. Sure, people who knew he was here could see it. But since he kept his address unlisted, the only people who knew the house was here were people he told and people from the neighborhood who knew the house before he bought it all those years ago.


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Cold Sandwiches and All: A Romantic Comedy

Mrs. Fromish's Guests

The Interpreter's Tale: A Word with Too Many Meanings

The Portrait of Geraldine Germaine

You Made My Heart a Hunter

To Hell and Back Again

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E. M. Epps is a participant in the Amazon Services LLC Associates Program, an affiliate advertising program designed to provide a means for sites to earn advertising fees by advertising and linking to amazon.com. (That's what they tell me I have to say. This is not a lucrative venture, but if you do decide you want to read one of the books I link to, and your neighborhood bookstore hasn't got it, then it would be simply lovely if you were to go to Amazon via one of my links. That may get me 10c or so and then if a bunch of you do that maybe I would get myself a cup of tea or something like that. If you're feeling nice.)

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