My favorite part of the book was easily Maxine’s relationships to the people around her. The wandering hunter has settled down and made a life for herself in the community of Seattle, and naturally, this only leads to trouble. The first time we see her, however, she’s working in a homeless shelter alongside a former priest, and the two of them are remarkably close. Because of her duty, Maxine was taught to live as a wanderer, drifting from place to place and never allowing herself to become close to anyone. The power they carry comes through their tattoos, which are actually a set of five demons who live on their bodies by day and become separate beings by night. Their whole family has been demon hunters, passing the job down through the generations from mother to daughter for centuries. I will say that Maxine Kiss is a demon hunter, as was her mother before her.

Knowing this will make the prologue much clearer.Īside from that detail, I’m not sure how much of a synopsis I can give, since part of the joy of the novel was in unraveling it and in little moments of joy as a detail suddenly made sense. Think of demons, the kinds that can slip into human skin and possess them, stealing a life for as long as they wish. I will say this: when you see the word “zombie”, don’t think of shambling corpses who want to devour the flesh of the living. I can’t tell how much I ought to simply give away and how much to withhold, even more so than with other novels. It does make writing a review rather difficult. After all, what’s the point in writing a novel full of secrets if the protagonist reveals everything to the readers? There were times when trying to figure out what was happening threw me off from the story, but at the same time, I think it was effective. Instead, she throws them into the world with little preamble and only exposition that would naturally be in Maxine’s thoughts. Liu doesn’t give the readers easy answers.

It isn’t just in the way the protagonist, Maxine Kiss, keeps secrets from the rest of the world, or in the way the demons who live in her tattoos keep secrets from her, or even in the way she has to pry answers out of everyone around her in an attempt to understand what’s happening to the world she knows.

The iron hunt by marjorie m liu