Review: Deadbeat Druid by David R. Slayton

Title: Deadbeat Druid

Series: The Adam Binder Novels: Book Three

Author: David R. Slayton

Publisher: Blackstone Publishing

Length: 323 Pages

Category: Fantasy

Rating: 5 Stars

At a Glance: While indulging my every love of lush, evocative storytelling, Slayton has also developed a cast of characters who more than undertook the responsibility of this journey; they carried it admirably. Deadbeat Druid is brilliant, lavish Fantasy.

Reviewed By: Lisa

Blurb: The living cannot be allowed to infect the dead.

Adam Binder has lost what matters most to him. Having finally learned the true identity of the warlock preying on his family, what was supposed to be a final confrontation with the fiend instead became a trap that sent Adam’s beloved Vicente into the realm of the dead, where none living are meant to be.

Bound by debt, oath, and love, Adam blazes his own trail into the underworld to get Vicente back, and to end the threat of the warlock once and for all. But the road to hell is paved with far more than good intentions. Demons are hungry, and ghosts are relentless, and what awaits Adam in the underworld is nothing he is prepared to face.

If that weren’t enough, Adam has one more thing he must do if he and Vicente are to return to the world of the living: find the lost heart of Death herself.

Review: Imagine, if you will, a collaboration between Stephen King and Lewis Carroll, writing a novel about life and the greatest of all mysteries, the after-life. Throw in a Warlock who has made a bargain to rid the world of his malevolent great-grandfather, and his Reaper boyfriend who disappeared into the Other Side and must be found—whatever the price. Add in allies and adversaries, hungry demons and roving ghosts, mercurial landscapes, and the past coming back for a haunt or two. If you can do so, you just might dream up something like David R. Slayton’s masterstroke of storytelling, The Deadbeat Druid. Maybe King and Carroll would have called it Adam in Underland. Or maybe that’s just me.

This story is told from both Adam’s and Vic’s points of view, so readers are treated to twice the imagination as they each make their own trip through the underworld in search of each other, and then a way out. Adam has been given the additional task of finding someone on Death’s orders: a living girl who must be returned to where she belongs. Failure is not an option if the balance between Life and Death is to be maintained. Much of the suspense in Deadbeat Druid relies upon not only what incomprehensible dangers the characters may encounter along the highways and byways of this unpredictable Underland, but in whether or not Adam will succeed in finding Vic, ending his great-grandfather’s reign of terror, and saving the woman he’s been charged to find. All while preserving something of his integrity, if not his mortal soul.

While indulging my every love of lush, evocative storytelling, Slayton has also developed a cast of characters who more than undertook the responsibility of this journey; they carried it admirably. Whether I liked the character or not, the point was that each and every one of them served their purpose in the story. They were real, flawed, curious, sinister, and, in some cases, larger-than-life. Through it all, Adam Lee Binder changes, grows, mourns, loves, and, despite what he has become, he remains true to who he is.

Deadbeat Druid navigates life and death, and because this is Adam’s world, Life and Death. It delivers Adam and Vic to a new beginning, not because it was preordained but because they went through hell and back to get there. It’s a story of family and all the complications and heartaches and conflict and love and bitterness that comes with them. It’s a story of magic and mysticism, where friends and allies aren’t always human. It is brilliant, lavish Fantasy.

You can buy Deadbeat Druid here:
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