Bookburners: Season One Is a Storytelling Experiment as Addictive as Your Favorite TV Show

Created by Max Gladstone (author of the Craft Sequence novels), who also acts as “showrunner,” Bookburners is an adventurous, sometimes nightmarishly creepy work of urban fantasy threaded though with veins of Warehouse 13, Indiana Jones, and The Librarians. Along with the rest of the writing room, including Mur Lafferty, Brian Francis Slattery, and Margerat Dunlap, Gladstone has crafted an episodic storyline replete with twists, turns, humor, and horror, within trigue galore, and a whip-fast plot. The multiple voices blend together in a surprisingly cohesive whole.
NYPD Detective Sal Brooks knows there’s magic in this world, because she’s come face-to-face with it. After watching a demon possess and nearly kill her brother, she makes the decision to join the group that helped save him: the Societas Librorum Occultorum, a Vatican-sponsored organization tasked with hunting down ancient tomes imbued with demonic, totemic, and magical power, and locking them away. Some call them the Bookburners; they don’t really appreciate the name. Sal joins them, and together they uncover these dangerous books the world over, and begin to unravel the conspiracy behind a fellow hunter, Mr. Norse.
This first season bind-up has two fantastic things going for it: the colorful cast of characters, and unified voice of the writers room giving them life. On a plot level, it aims for the sweet spot between literary horror and pulp-adventure fun. Each episode is quick-paced and incredibly readable, providing just enough depth and pathos in to counterbalance a world filled with very real danger. There are wry moments,—a tongue-in-cheek lightness that lives really well in the urban fantasy space—but it’s the lively, three-dimensional cast truly elevates what could be simple, fun adventures into deeper, character-based stories.
Each Bookburner has been affected by magic in some way, shape, or form, usually for the worse. Every mission means the world to them, because it could actually take the world from them. Sal almost lost her brother. Father Menchu has first-hand experience with the horrific shapes magic can take. Liam lost two years of his life to a dark power. Grace is haunted by her violent past. Asanti knows what terrors lurk within her Archives. These diverse, often conflicted, but compassionate people bounce off one another, cause friction, fight, kick ass, feel loss, and spur each other onward, to be better people, for each other and for the world. Their highs and lows energize the episodic quality of the season, meshing well into the overall arch of the story.
You can tell how much work all four writers put into this story. While Gladstone was showrunner, and the episodes were penned by writers working solo, you can’t really tell where one writer’s work ends and another’s begins. The tone and voice is absolutely seamless, even as each writer displays their little twists and quirks—Gladstone’s chapters have an unmistakeable narrative depth and charge; Lafferty’s tend toward the more humorous and character introspective—but the combined effects creates a cohesive book that truly does work as a novel. It’s an impressive feat, one they accomplish with gusto.
If you value deep characters, horror mixed with urban fantasy, fast, readable prose, and an energetic plot, Bookburners is going to be exactly your thing . It’s a real victory out of the gate for Serial Box, and I’ll be following what comes next with great interest. (Hate waiting? All the episodes of Bookburners: Season Two are available as ebooks now.)