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Tuesday 22 August 2017

Demon, Volume 3 by Jason Shiga Review


While I’ve enjoyed Jason Shiga’s exemplary Demon enormously, Volume 3 is unfortunately the weakest book in the series so far. Which isn’t to say it’s bad but it feels a bit like filler, and repetitive filler at that, as it’s largely similar to the last volume. 

Jimmy and Sweetpea now practically have eternal life but doing whatever they want has left them jaded and bored. And, though Shiga continues to imaginatively explore the demon powers, it’s pretty uninteresting to read these two putter about aimlessly for the first half of the book - the absence of a plot is keenly felt. Jimmy reaches out to Gellman, one of the original demons, but it’s not that great to read a ton of exposition on the demon experiments. 

Thankfully things pick up once Hunter re-emerges and suddenly we have the cat and mouse story between Hunter and Jimmy once again. Shiga creates one of the funniest, most original chase sequences I’ve ever seen which is definitely the best part of the book. Hunter’s elaborate traps for Jimmy and Sweetpea remain amusingly absurd but read more than a little like maths problems which took me out of the story. 

Shiga ends things by placing Jimmy in an intriguing dilemma for the start of the fourth and final volume which I look forward to reading but this third book was disappointingly weak and felt largely unnecessary.

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