This books share part of the DNA with American Gods but it is missing some of the magic.
A good book, well written even if it is a bit too violent for my taste.
Recommended if you like urban fantasy with a lot of violence.
Many thanks to Netgalley and Rebellion Publishing

This is...crazy. Crazy in a good way, though I much preferred the second half to the first. The first was so out there, with so little explanation of what was happening, that I almost stepped away. In just the nick of time, I started to learn more about the main character and why things for him were so crazy off the rails. At that point, I definitely got more invested in the book, and would certainly be curious to read book two. While this one does have an ending, it is also quite apparent that there is more - much more - to come.

https://solothefirst.wordpress.com/2018/02/27/review-unclean-spirits-by-chuck-wendig/

A great take on modern gods living among us, and how we mere mortals would react in their presence. Looking forward to continuing this saga, and and a monster fan of this author!

Gritty and violent, and thoroughly enjoyable!

Carson Cole escapes his life of servitude when a bomb destroys his boss, Mr E. Rose. Yes, if you say it quickly it sounds like Eros, and that’s because it IS Eros. Carson learns that he is embroiled in the world of the Gods from every pantheon. They have all been cast out of the heavens by ‘The Usurper’ and are having to scratch out a life on Earth. Not many of them actually like it.
Carson had lost his life five years previously to Eros’ whims, and his wife and son hate him. He goes on a journey with Frank (who is frankly, a horrific character) to find out why this is. It’s a ‘100mph’ book: non-stop action pretty much, and if you like Gods (and monsters!) you’ll like this. It has a very dark, menacing atmosphere: dirty, unclean, violent. I enjoyed it! There was a bit (a huge!) twist at the end.
I also enjoyed the short story at the end by Pat Kelleher (Drag Hunt) featuring Coyote. This story isn’t set completely in the US, but does start there and ends in London and it’s environs. Coyote has lost a rather important part of himself, and is determined to find it. A very enjoyable story, again, with a great selection of Norse, Celtic, Egyptian and other Gods that I have probably forgotten in it! I find myself very much enjoying these stories with Coyote in. He’s very much the Loki of the North American native people. Got to love a trickster!

As a fan of myths and legends, I always read books involving gods wreaking havoc on the modern world with relish! Chuck Wendig hasn't disappointed here, with this tale. We follow Cason, as he tries to find out who blew up his boss, while attempting to reconnect with his family and being hampered by divine interference. Some of the plot points are a little bit formulaic and the dialogue is sometimes a bit clunky. However, I thoroughly enjoyed the narrative and thought that Wendig had done a marvellous job of bringing some of the gods to life. There are moments which are truly disturbing and others that are funny, creating great light and shade through the novel, which is very well paced. I would love to see a follow up to this story - it seems to me like a really interesting world to inhabit with loads of scope for further exploration. Anyone who likes American Gods, or adults who like the Percy Jackson series will find much to appreciate in this book.
I received a free copy of this book from NetGalley in exchange for a fair and honest review.

Very fun book! Very reminiscent of Neil Gaiman's American Gods with a little bit of Phillip Pullman's Dark Materials, and is a great way to pass the time until the next season of the tv show comes out. Good action, well written and kept me interested all the way through.

Unclean Spirits by Chuck Wendig
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

Let's be real here. This one is bare-bones wicked, amping up the horror elements, the noir mystery elements, and then, finally, a total American Gods vibe.

Only all the gods have been cast down and the one who cast them down is gone. As in gone, gone. What's left? All the b-listers with a fragment of their original abilities, from Sumerian, Greek... everything... working to maintain their little kingdoms in the modern world.

Fifty years of this, and even the gods are jaded, annoyed, and upset about their lot in life.

This isn't funny like Kevin Hearne's great Iron Druid series. It's not sly like a natural noir. It's gritty, bloody, and dense. It starts with great action and mystery and always just trying to keep one's head afloat, and it gets absolutely wild with absolutely enormous stakes. As in an empty hell and and empty heaven kind of stakes.

It's hardcore cool, but it's also tiring as hell.

Who should I recommend this to? Anyone who's a fan of old gumshoe tales, super-gritty and disturbing personal lives, and anyone who wants a world of mean streets full of all the most fantastic gods. Eros gets murdered, Psyche is a MC, and so is Aphrodite. Want more? Read the book. No spoilers, but it's wild. Shifting alliances, backstabbers, hidden gods and imprisoned ones, awesome parentages and bloodlines fill these pages while always remaining true to a hardcore thriller mode.

I'm super impressed. I'm really surprised that this isn't being read by everyone. Like, rabidly. Especially all you folks who love your mythologies and can trace all the bloodlines of all the gods and demigods.

It's important. :)

And thanks to Netgalley for the ARC! (Republished, I do believe.)

https://www.runalongtheshelves.net/blog/2018/2/12/unclean-spirits-gods-and-monsters-by-chuck-wendig

To some the photocopier at work not working is a bad day at the office but to Cason Cole he finds someone blew his boss into pieces can really dampen your day. This goes from bad to worse when he returns to his family home five years late and finds out that his wife and infant son immediately want to kill him on sight. Cason starts to realise that somethings are not adding up. So, begins an intriguing mix of crime drama and supernatural battle with the gods.

It’s a fascinating story that builds up pace as Cason starts to find that the world he lives in is magical and full of Gods. Not just the usual big names of the Greek and roman pantheons but those of Native Americans, Asia and even very small local gods all aware of each other. For reasons not fully explained all the world’s pantheons are banished to Earth with some of their power. Cason finds his employer was one and sadly his family have decided Cason is the number one suspect. His only allies are a taxi driver good Samaritan and an incredibly scarred and uncouth man known as the Cicatrix. Cason must find out who has framed him or risk losing his family….and his wife.

For starters this is clearly a Chuck Wendig book. If you’ve read his Miriam Black novels (you really should) you know this is a writer who can make supernatural noir sing like a choir. It’s a dirty, visceral and nasty world of double-crosses, violence swearing and all of it happens in the dirty side-streets, dark bars and abandoned factories of the US. The dialogue is short and snappy and characters bounce snark off each other while at the same time Wendig gives all his heroes (and even some villains) some added depth. Cason is a large fighter, but you’ll side with him not just because he has a fine line in humour, but we see this man is absolutely in love with his wife and child. Over the story we invest ourselves in this man who while not academic is clearly smart and driven. In fact, he ends up having to become an expert in mythology. A nice piece of character development subverting your initial expectations when you meet him!

And although it’s an ultra-violent world where you’ll feel each punch, bone break and bleeding wound it is balanced with a fascinating set-up of this connected pantheon that Cason is trying to find out how to unpick it from his family life. Part of the fun is working out who the God of the chapter is and then what their potential weakness or angle in this game is. You may be surprised where some legends have started to live, and this can move from drama to in one historic scene of mass murder some chilling horror in the dark…

My one issue is that it’s got such blistering pace and these early scenes make this world so vibrant with gods in the streets and alleys that it slightly loses pace in the last act when we move from Cason’s personal battle to sort his life out to a slightly more greater scale. I felt the story loses some energy and it doesn’t quite gel with the more human-level drama we got before.

In special bonus addition at the end of the story (also signalling that it looks like there will be other entrants in the same shared universe) there is a short novella from Pat Kelleher set shortly after the events in Wendig’s novel. One of the US pantheon gets embroiled with a UK tourist in what turns out to be an quest with some potentially world-ending events. Kelleher has a nice ear for dialogue which has a slightly less harsh sense of humour than Wendig, but the story feels more magical as we replace the streets of the US for eventually London and the countryside.

Overall, I think this is very much for the fan who enjoys books like American Gods but in terms of style would like to see a fast-paced noir crime thriller rather than simply epic fantasy. Certainly not for the weak but for me Wendig is a poet at making the dirty streets shine brightly on the page. Definitely worth a look!

Just really didn't do it for me. Wendig has skill as a writer, but even still I just didn't get into this at all. The characters were too unlikable to care about, and the greater story ideas were things I've seen before, but better-executed in those other stories.

A dark, violent version of American Gods. This didn't feel like other Wendig novels I've read. I can't decide if that's a good thing or not. It reads a lot like a noir version of Gaiman's American Gods without the depth and poetry of that novel. It felt like an American version of the book. More crude, more focused on violence. It shares a lot of the same DNA, so anyone with a passing interest in the subject matter may find something worthwhile here. And if you hated Gaiman's book, this may be exactly what you're looking for!

This review appears on Goodreads, and will be cross-posted to my blog later this month.

This is an extremely difficult book to review, mostly because this is an extremely weird book.

I've described this as American Gods but weirder, and I think that's relatively accurate. Essentially Wendig has created a world where gods of all pantheons are hanging out on earth after being cast out of their various heavens and otherworlds by 'the Usurper', and now they're causing trouble and manipulating mortals (or at least, people who think they're mortals).

Caught up in all of this is Cason. He first encountered the gods after a man told him he could save his wife and child from burning to death in a car. They're alive, but they've been enchanted so that whenever he comes near them they try to kill him, which isn't ideal. Then he spent several years working for Eros, whom he hated. Eros is murdered in the first chapter, and several other vengeful gods (including Psyche) come after him, thinking he did the deed. And it spirals from there.

This isn't a book you'll enjoy if you don't like Chuck Wendig's writing style, because it's a very Wendig book. I've only read a handful of his other novels, but I read his blog regularly, and this had many of the same linguistic hallmarks. There are choppy sentences. Bizarre descriptions and metaphors that make you choke-laugh with surprise. A good dollop of profanity.

For the most part, I enjoyed the writing style. I like descriptions that are unexpected, because they blow the cobwebs off language and get rid of cliches. I felt like Chuck Wendig's similes were somehow more honest than more conventional descriptions. That said, it took me a while to settle into the choppy sentence structures, and there were also a few things I didn't like -- such as the apparent need to describe every female character's nipples and what direction they were pointing in. I mean, really? Does anyone care that much about nipples?

(Throughout the book as a whole I was definitely less keen on Wendig's portrayal of female characters here compared to some of his other books. This is a reprint of a book that's a few years old, so maybe that's a sign that he's matured as a writer, or maybe this one just happens to be told from the perspectives of sex-obsessed male characters, I'm not sure.)

I've said that this book was weird and it's hard to explain exactly what I mean by that, but... look. One of the major plotlines is that a trickster god's detachable semi-autonomous penis gets stolen, and he's trying to get it back. That's the kind of level of strange we're dealing with. And I have to say, that part wasn't my favourite; I'm not a fan of disembodied genitalia, or indeed, any other kind of genitalia.

Generally speaking, I liked the first half of the book better than the second. The first half was weird and full of random pagan gods turning up and I liked trying to guess who they were before their names were revealed and I was enjoying the weird metaphors. Then, in the second half, the focus became a little bit more on Coyote's obsession with finding his penis (and indeed, his dick obsession in general). And that was also when the Celtic gods came into it.

I know what you're thinking. That should've been the part I liked! I like Celtic stuff! But here's the thing: I am extremely wary of any portrayals of Celtic 'mythology' because the truth is, you cannot reconstruct a pre-Christian pantheon from the evidence we have, because they're all written in a Christian context. Folks like Cernunnos, who we know virtually nothing about barring, like, one inscription and a handful of carvings... sure, do whatever you want. But the use of <i>literary</i> characters to represent <i>mythological</i> figures tends to get my hackles up.

So that's where I'm coming from with any book that involves Celtic gods in any sense, and I also strongly disagreed with some of Wendig's characterisation choices there, so there was that. Plus I wasn't comfortable with his decision to have a single 'Celtic' pantheon that included both Irish and Welsh figures, because the two aren't actually the same thing. But I liked Cernunnos. He was badass. Now, obviously, many of the other gods featured were probably drastic oversimplifications that people who know about <i>those</i> gods would have disagreed with; I just only really have opinions on the Celtic ones.

Anyway, I began to enjoy the book significantly less once its key focuses were (a) dicks, which I'm not interested in, and (b) Celtic gods, whose characterisation I disagreed with. It also took a slightly weird theological turn.

I think the difference between this and <i>American Gods</i> -- not that it's really fair to compare them -- is that <i>American Gods</i> has a built-in reason for why you might disagree with the characterisation of gods: because they're only one version of those figures, created by the beliefs of those who brought them to America. That gives plenty of wiggle room to disagree, and makes the book more enjoyable as a result. This, though, has the gods as singular representations, which is less flexible.

Anyway, that's not to say I didn't enjoy it; like I said, I found the writing style really refreshing, and I felt like Wendig's use of language was one of the book's strengths. It also wasn't a short book, and yet I found myself racing through it (even when I was supposed to be doing other things) -- definitely a compelling read.

But I enjoyed the first half considerably more than the second, and that shift is why it's only getting three stars instead of four.

Another rollicking good ride from Chuck Wendig. This is American Gods' older, meaner, just-out-of-prison big brother. Yes, it's violent. Yes, there's bad language. Yes, that's exactly what we want and expect from Wendig.

Unclean Spirits definitely feels written for the more 'macho' male readers who like a lot of action, graphic scenes, violence, swearing and adult content in general. AKA 200% not my cup of tea... And it showed. While I did like the short and direct writing style Chuck Wendig uses to bulldozer through this story, I wasn't a fan at all of the constant swearing and existence of graphic/adult scenes. This has more to do with me not being the target group than the story itself being a bad one, but trigger warnings are definitely in place here. Due to the general tone and wrong target group, I had a really hard time connecting to the characters as well, but I guess this is understandable being in my situation and all. I do have to say I loved the whole mythology angle and this was what saved Unclean Spirits for me. The urban fantasy genre shows and the mix of real world and supernatural is quite balanced. Mythology played a role throughout the story and I liked how many different gods and religions were incorporated. The plot itself had a lot of potential as well. So if you think you are the right target group for Unclean Spirits, you will probably have a heck of a ride waiting for you.

Wendig puts his own unique style on this gritty novel that kicked off a new series for Abaddon Books. An American Gods style urban fantasy with more blood, guts and action, its a snappy read full of interesting characters and delivered at break-neck speed.
The updated version also includes the bonus bizzarro novella 'Drag Hunt' by Pat Kellehe, set in the same universe.
A solid effort.

Summary: Cason is on a race to find out who killed his boss and took away his family.


What I liked: HOLY SHIT! From the first page to the last page you are running. I enjoyed Wendig's writing style. It is fast paced and that is just what I needed for a Saturday. The characters are fleshed out and enjoyable. I cared about what happened to Cason and his friends (well all except one). You know who I am talking about Mr. Wendig. It was descriptive without being pedantically descriptive. Overall just a super fun read.


What I didn't like: This has NOTHING to do with the story and does not effect my rating, Wendig killed off one of my favorite characters. It was one of those moments when the word NO escapes from a reader's lips.
Star

Rating: 5


My thoughts: BUY this book if you enjoy: myths, fast paced action, great writing style and like able characters.


Release Date: February 13th, 2018.

Revisiting American Gods for the first time since its publication via Starz tv show adaptation can put one in a nostalgic mood or maybe in a mood to read something in similar vein. Unclean Spirits fit the bill and I was interested in trying out a new author. Interestingly enough though, while this one is a beginning of a series (of course it is), it’s a series for Abaddon Publishing, not for Wendig. He departs this book just over two thirds of the way in (and quite abruptly actually) and the rest is taken up by a different story set in the same fictionverse. Kind of a dizzying turn there. So really these are two different stories in one book and should be reviewed accordingly. Does one get any kudos for originality when the plot has essentially and famously been done before and spectacularly? It’s a tricky business. It’s nearly impossible not to compare, but it frames an opinion and informs the review nicely. There are nuances here, various attempts to create a fresh spin on the premise. These Gods and Monsters have been expelled from the pantheon quite recently, for one thing, 50 and 30 years ago only respectively in both stories. There are new names, lesser knowns, old folklore revisited, some fun characters, that’s my favorite part probably, the pantheons, the mythologies. There’s a lot more graphic action and violence, Wendig does a sort of tough guy narration, you know, the one with short sentences, fast paced, limited ruminations. Less navel gazing, more gut ripping, etc. The second story is more subtle in that respect, just a rascally Trickster trying to locate some of his anatomy while possibly saving the world from a global domination scheme dreamt up by some old disgruntled deities. Both stories do feature innovative plotlines, both are well written, both are very entertaining. The main difference between American Gods and this version of it really is that the former is a proper (and gorgeous) allegory about immigration, striking, original, epic, positively one of a kind. And the rest…are just fun. Which is perfectly good in itself, especially if you know what to expect. Strange though, when it isn’t a single author, seems like quality might be affected. The again American Gods is changing up showmakers for the second season and that sounds ominous. Must be difficult to maintain the standards that way. Anyway…genre fans will find much to enjoy with these fantasies and as far as new author introductions go, this was pretty decent too. Thanks Netgalley.