Among the immortals that inhabit our world, Arnaud Demeure is known as the man who can fulfill your one true wish or who can also conjure your worst nightmares.
Eight invitations are sent to eight immortals, and when Arnaud Demeure hosts a party, no one refuses his request. Why have they been summoned? Is it for a celebration or does a sinister fate await them? After all, in the ways of magick, a party can also be a ritual to end the world.
As the mystery deepens, the attendees must overcome their personal grudges to unravel the threads of Demeure's grand plan that has been centuries in the making. But, with one of the guests secretly working with their host to sabotage the group's every move, it seems impossible to look behind the curtain to learn Demeure's true intentions.
With each guest hiding dark secrets and darker intentions, will they be able to uncover Demeure's mysterious motives or will the party prove to be the deadly nightmare that they each fear?
Lovers of horror fantasy will quickly lose themselves in the labyrinth of Blackbird’s novel, a world where every fresco reveals macabre history. Drawing from folklore and necromancy with evocative prose, A Wish Too Dark and Kind traces Arnaud’s gifts back to the Tower of Babel, to the birth of the “Scarlet Woman, born from the creators,” the sacrifice he needs in order to access unlimited powers. He will stop at nothing to get what he wants, including killing several of his attendees all under the guise of granting their obsessions and wishes. In the process, buried mysteries get uncovered, old ties get severed, and destructive occult forces get unleashed.
Blackbird proves adept at immersing readers into his dark world, offering abundant rituals, sacrifices, and supernatural powers, while the eerie setting cleverly mirrors the characters’ spectral abilities. The sheer number of roles to track—combined with an epic length, a singularly complex plot, and an inventive magical language system—may be daunting for readers new to the genre, but in the end, Blackbird triumphs with this hair-raising, enveloping mystery.
Takeaway: A chilling epic of the occult, with satisfying character depth and a cliffhanger ending.
Great for fans of: Clive Barker’s The Damnation Game, Stephen Dobyns’s The Burn Palace.
Production grades
Cover: A
Design and typography: A
Illustrations: N/A
Editing: A-
Marketing copy: A
