Endangered Species

“Maybe goodness itself is the endangered species.” — Lohiau

Endangered Species is a hardcover release in the Angel franchise that has a story both fast-flowing and action-filled. The second half of the book becomes a breathless, wild ride for the reader, and it’s great fun. There is much to recommend it for fans, so I’ll dive right in.

A very formidable man named Escobar has created an army of special creatures who are now under the control of his wife, Marianna, with whom he is in love. He is trying to track her down to cure here of her vampirism. To do so, he needs the ancient and fabled — perhaps mythical — Book of Interregnum to perform a ritual that will bring the Father of all vampires to life. Escobar wants to perform show more a ceremony and slay the Beast of the First Blood, thus, ending all vampirism. Side effect — Angel will die as well, but it’s a sacrifice he’s willing to make in order to save his friends, especially Cordy.

If that sounds complicated, it’s about to get more complicated. Cordelia has a vision of something evil happening to Faith, her being hunted. But Faith is in prison, so how can that be? Enter Wolfram & Hart, with Lilah and Nathan and Gavin aiding Marianna to spring Faith, for a very special and profitable hunt — something similar to the old story and classic film, The Most Dangerous Game.

Back in the day, Angelus turned seer Drusilla, which sort of made her Darla’s granddaughter?

“This vampire stuff is all kind of incestuous, isn’t it?” Fred asked, looking thoughtful.
“More than I like to think about,” Cordy drawled, grimacing. “I mean, eew. It’s Chinatown, Jake.”

Not knowing how to use her vampirism, Drusilla makes the young — and nearly as insane as herself — Mary Kelly, into one. Mary becomes sister Benedicta, forming her own mix of Kabalistic rituals and blasphemous texts to gather followers from all corners of the globe. And power. She hooks up with a Druid named Bran Cahir and he becomes the High Priest of Mysteries of Benedicta. She wants the same book that Escobar is after, but not to kill the Beast. She wants to raise him so he can mate with her and create a more powerful and dominant type of vampire who can rule mankind. All she needs is a seer. Yep, you guessed who she wants —

“I’m superficial, not stupid.” — Cordelia

Before this is all over we have factions of the gang in separate places. Faith, Wes and Gunn become part of the hunt — being the hunted. Only the fragile Fred is left behind when her friends are violently kidnapped. She and Lorne must get word to Angel, who’s off in Maui to contact a powerful Hawaiian priest named Lohian, a man who once prevented Darla from breaking the gypsy curse which restored Angel’s soul to him, tainting him for his lover, Darla.

Trying to explain how a chalice, a mummy called the Virgin of Nuremberg, and a powerful protection amulet that Wes gives Faith despite their ugly history play into this thing is possible, but it would ruin the fun. There is loads of action and fights, tons of plot, and the characters are spot on — especially Cordelia, who has some great lines, even on the brink of merging with the Father of all vamps. Everyone in fact has some great moments here, and it's awesome to have Faith included. In addition, Endagered Species has a mostly satisfying ending — Faith’s quick, off-screen departure was a disappointment — to this extremely enjoyable story in the Angel franchise of books.

Jeff Mariotte and Nancy Holder have written an incredibly enjoyable Angel outing for fans of the show, or just the book franchise. If I have a small “but” concerning the narrative it would be that it moves so fast, has so many tentacles, that it dilutes the resonance we sometimes get with the better stories in the book franchise; usually written by Mariotte, but sometimes Odom or Sniegoski. Don’t get me wrong — Nancy Holder and Jeff Mariotte have written a bang-up story in Endangered Species, one that is highly recommended. Entertaining is the best way to describe it.

Perhaps the best analogy of that minor “but” I can give will only be understood by fans of Robert B. Parker’s Spenser series. That analogy concerns the April Kyle stories. In the trilogy about April Kyle, which came years apart, the first book, Ceremony, was resonating. By the time Taming a Sea-Horse was written, the focus of the series had shifted away from resonance to entertainment. This made Sea-Horse a fast fun read, a great book as entertainment, but without the resonance or bite of Ceremony. Finally we got a return to the resonnce in the very powerful and moving Hundred-Dollar Baby.

In that analogy or comparison, Endangered Species would be Taming a Sea-Horse. It’s fast moving and fun, fantastic as entertainment, so it’s gonna get a great rating. Yet I felt the inclusion of SO many tentacles, the effort to have so many action scenes, and have this race to a frantic conclusion leaves little time for some of the moments of resonance we get from a few of the other books in the series. It watered them down a bit.

Though I’m not taking anything away from the story because of it, the editing process seems as rushed as the lightning pace of the narrative. I rarely comment on typos, because they occur all the time, in both big publishing house books and independent stuff. It happens, no big deal most of the time. I allow for a few to several in a story this size especially — 376 pages in my hardcover.

Typos were not the problem however. The process itself seemed rushed, with sentences that had obviously been rewritten having an unwanted word left in, or inverted. For example, something that should have read, “and the” in the middle of a sentence might read, “the and”, stopping you in your tracks a second before you realized what was meant. The word availability might be in a sentence when obviously available was the right word. It wasn’t just a few times, but a whole bunch, especially in the latter half of the book. This is Simon Pulse, so Simon and Schuster. I have the hardcover, not a Kindle version, where stuff can slip in, so it was really noticeable.

I really enjoyed Endangered Species, the second half especially. It’s great stuff, highly recommended. Despite being the one hardcover in the Angel franchise, I can’t say it’s my absolute favorite in the series. But I did have a blast reading it, and can certainly understand why it might be someone else’s. show less