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language: English
country: USA
year: 2024
form: novel
genre(s): fantasy
dates read: 9.11.25
Evan J. Peterson’s Better Living Through Alchemy is just kind of bland — a competently constructed urban fantasy, but not an especially inventive one, with many of the genre’s usual flaws.
the premise is pretty standard for an occult detective story: what if all occultism were real and there were supernatural detectives? Kelly Mun is one of these, a private investigator (though the Seattle police also have an occult unit) with a history of opiate addiction (something the book itself calls out as cliché) who’s been hired by a mysterious rich woman to investigate a brand-new street drug called “bardo” (as in the Tibetan Buddhist liminal space between death and reincarnation) that may be killing people.
there are the usual twists and turns as Kelly uses a combination of “clairolfaction” (the ability to magically detect things by smell, one of the only genuinely creative things here), automatic writing and autohypnosis, and miscellaneous occult practices — a tarot/numerology combination, pseudo-Hindu amulets, pseudo-Voodoo (broadly construed) spells, etc. — to track the drug to its source, uncovering an evil metaphysical plot. aside from the clairolfaction, the other standout element of the plot is its explicit focus on fakelore: the supernatural operations of bardo seem to turn on misunderstandings and misrepresentations of religion and folklore, rather than on actual religion and folklore. this is a nice change of pace in that it suggests that not everything you find on Wikipedia is necessarily accurate. on the other hand, the book’s engagement with spiritual traditions still basically reduces to things you can find on Wikipedia, despite Kelly’s cousin/assistant claiming that you need to use the “hexweb” (= the magic-focused part of the Deep Web™) to find information about Candomblé and Santería and even there information is scarce. sure, okay.
the writing is technically solid, and I will say that Peterson does a particularly good job of capturing the tone of informal speech in his dialogue, when he’s not having the character say things like “You gotta go really deep into the hexweb to find much on those traditions”. it’s strongly embedded in the urban space of Seattle, although I must say that I’ve never heard anyone refer to the University of Washington as “U of W” before — only UW or, in speech, “U-Dub”. this discrepancy did make me wonder if there are other Seattle things I missed, though Peterson apparently does live/work there.
otherwise, the book exemplifies one of the more dubious tendencies of North American urban fantasy, namely its reliance on superficial understandings of Black and Indigenous religions as core components of its (primarily non-Black, non-Indigenous) characters’ encounters with and use of magic and the supernatural (and, of course, there is a token Indigenous character, a Salish woman with Haida tattoos who’s doing a PhD in biology, does some lab work, and saves Kelly and her assistant from a demon). it’s exacerbated here by a general elision of diverse religious traditions into one “occult” blob: the Hindu deity Garuda can apparently be interpreted through tarot, for example. despite explicitly referring to a wide range of disparate religious traditions from around the world, there is a strong implication that, at the end of the day, they’re all the same thing.
I will say, there is a Black character — a cop, of course, with the surname Aweke (= Amharic), apparently Somali-speaking (?). he is, predictably, antagonistic towards Kelly but in a way where you can tell he’s going to come to grudgingly respect her. there’s also an evil Chinese doctor-crime lord-drug dealer (this is slightly offset by Kelly being half-Korean, but only slightly).
(side note, speaking of the token Indigenous character, Harriet, when she shows up her function in the narrative is to deny the relevance of Indigenous knowledge — because this is “alchemy” and that’s “[t]he scientific method applied to the impossible[.] We don’t really do that” — while reassuring Kelly’s assistant that he hasn’t been insensitive. later she says “thank you” in Lushootseed, which appears to be spelled accurately; the narration then gives a very dubious phonetic version of this, and Harriet further excuses either the characters or the reader from taking the language seriously by joking, “Just don’t ask me to spell it.”)
(there are actually two token indigenous characters; the other is a “genderless” Navajo “witch” who helps Kelly recover from her opiate addiction in a flashback, coaches her through learning to use her magical abilities, and offers her some Life Lessons. yet another exhausted colonial trope — something of which, I must emphasize, the book is well aware, as it has Rattlesnake call out their own portrayal:
Rattlesnake took a sip and said, “Aw, listen to me going on like some magic Hollywood Indian. I don’t know shit about the secrets of the universe. Does anyone? Your Dr. Leng sure didn’t. I just know how to help people. That’s enough for one lifetime.
if you know the character is behaving like a “Hollywood Indian” you could just…not write them this way. writing them exactly like fucking Song of the Loon but then sticking in a little “don’t worry, I know it’s racist but I’m not racist” doesn’t actually make it any less racist.)
(Kelly’s patron “goddess” is, of course, Brigid, characterized repeatedly as a “Celtic goddess”. there’s a passing reference to the possibility that she’s “avoiding” her Korean heritage, in response to which she does have one (1) conversation with a bodhisattva, but that’s it.)
all of that said, this is very petty, but the thing that most irked me about the book — which is otherwise pretty much par for the course for urban fantasy — was actually a passing comment in its little exposition paragraph about the status of magic in this world:
Most people couldn’t reconcile the occult with their need to control and predict their own reality. Some people, mostly atheists, were adamant that there was no such thing as magic. Those with a superstitious nature believed in it deep down, but it scared them, so they avoided talking or even thinking about it. In general, people just ignored the occult or explained it away. A few misfits—the psychics, the queers, the neuroatypical, and the natural-born witches—couldn’t ignore it, so they often embraced it.
which I think basically sums up why I did not especially enjoy this book — it’s from the “astrology is Queer actually and if you don’t like it you’re homophobic/transphobic” branch of contemporary anglophone queer culture, with an added bonus of “being neurodivergent means you Understand Magic”. the dig at atheists denying the existence of magic in a setting where it’s objectively real (again, the Seattle cops have an occult division) is just the cherry on top. it is the kind of book that, by way of performing its Queer credentials, takes its protagonists to a bathhouse with — shocking — a glory hole to say “see? I am Transgressive and Cool. I go to clubs and fuck in the back room”, but in a way that comes off not as transgressive or even like you actually fuck in the back room but rather as self-congratulatory, perhaps because, while Kelly is bisexual, her assistant is still ultimately a not-not-sassy gay best friend who hooks up with monsters and whose first reaction when they’re called to the bathhouse is “I hope it wasn’t anyone I know” — you can practically see the author winking and nudging.
I say this as someone who enjoys fucked-up “transgressive” queer fiction: I need more than this and Kelly doing rituals with menstrual blood, lol. I definitely need more than “alchemical androgynes, sacred intersex bodies. Two-spirit shamans. The unified energies of transcendent alchemy” — particularly when these are invoked as a lead-in to announcing that Kelly’s assistant (not Indigenous and so categorically not Two-Spirit) is trans and “the most genderfluid person I’ve ever known” and also referring to him as “an epicene” (though he has only ever been described as a man, albeit an effeminate one. hello?), particularly in a book that in chapter 1 has Kelly lie about being a trans woman in order to maintain her cover story so she can sneak into a crime scene. this is all without touching the very end where it sets up for a sequel.
moods: adventurous, dark, horny, mysterious