Reviewed by: Sue Eaton

TITLE: Lust and Other Demons

SERIES: Hammer Falls #1

AUTHOR: Tal Frost

PUBLISHER: Self Published

LENGTH: 489 Pages

RELEASE DATE: August 5, 2022

BLURB:

Belonging can sometimes be Hell.

Jin is 17, pansexual, blue-haired, half-Korean and a lifelong outsider. His modus operandi, after years of neglect and chaos is never belong, never attach, because both just bring pain. What he doesn’t know, and mustn’t, is if he does ever belong, his lust demon father will take him to Hell forever the day he turns 18.

But when he moves to the remote Scottish town of Hammer Falls, where he shouldn’t fit in at all, he finds being supernatural and queer aren’t quite the barriers to belonging he’d hoped. As his lust demon blood begins to show and he grows ever closer to gorgeous, part-angel demon stalker Nate, how long can Jin continue to convince himself he doesn’t belong and isn’t getting attached?

REVIEW:

This book is teenage angst at its best.  Jin has been made to feel like an outsider his whole life, no one, not his Mother or anyone else has ever loved or made Jin feel like he belongs.  His mother frequently goes off and leaves him, never saying why or when she’ll be back.  She dumps him on a distant friend who also ignores his presence, in fact goes out of his way to make the house Jin is living in feel unwelcome.  Jin understandably has a very prickly exterior, complemented by his flamboyant fashion sense and his doesn’t give a damm attitude.  He relies on himself as he knows from bitter experience no one else will be there for him.

He expects Hammer Falls to be the same as what has always come before, surprisingly to him he finds a group of people who not only accept him but who want to befriend him.  But then Hammer Falls is no ordinary town, and the small group are no ordinary teenagers.

Little by little secrets are uncovered and a series of brutal murders highlights that things are not what they seem.  Jin seems to be at the centre of all the strange occurrences but is very much being kept in the dark, for his own good.

Nate is your typical overachieving teenager, good looking, captain of the Shinty Team, seems to have his act together but not mean or arrogant.  However, Nate has a secret life as a demon slayer, in training, called upon to fight any type of supernatural incursion with other members of the friends group.   The expectation is that he will face his trials and upon completion of the trials go away to further his training at college.  Nate and Jin are drawn together as they try to unravel what is going on.  All the while the clock is ticking down to Jin 18^th Birthday, Jin thinks that is the deadline for him going back to Paris.  However, in reality it is the deadline to Jin’s Demon father coming to claim him.  Both Nate and Jin have a deadline they aren’t keen to meet as they both think that will be the end of their relationship, so Jin tries desperately to keep things light and attachment free.

There is so much soul searching, wondering, yearning, angst in this book as Jin explores what he is feeling, why he is feeling it, why he is drawn to Nate, what it all means and as their relationship deepens, and the friendships within the group develop how all these things intertwine.  The relationships within the friends and the interplay between all the different characters is really interesting and nice to see the side characters being given such dimension within the central story.

The conundrum for me, is you want a child so desperately you make a deal with a demon, then to stop the demon claiming the child on their 18^th Birthday you must make sure they don’t form any attachment bonds to anyone or anything.  So the child you yearned for, you have to ignore.  So you don’t raise the child you wanted, as you have to ignore it, so they don’t form an attachment. This is the basis of the book and such an interesting concept.

I really enjoyed this book whilst it is paranormal and interesting, at its heart its about relationships and how we form them and what is most important to us.

RATING:

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