Spells of Blood and Kin Is an Absorbing, Unusual Urban Fantasy

Claire Humphrey’s Spells of Blood and Kin certainly lives up to this promise. It’s set in the rundown neighborhoods near the University of Toronto, teeming with dive bars and sports bars, the sort of place where the drug war comes down to a literal fight in an alleyway, where you pay cash for a place to crash and keep your head down. Amongst these neighborhoods live Lissa Nevsky and Maksim Volkov. Lissa is recent inheritor of the title of koldun’ia (village witch) of the local Russian community, an honor she earned upon the passing of her Baba. She is half-trained and full of questions, her grandmother taken too soon, but trying to keep up appearances with an intimidating crowd of eagle-eyed Russian grandmothers and aunts.
Maksim, meanwhile, is a member of the ancient kin, a long-lived race of vampire-like violent beings who may have given rise to the legends of the beserkers of battles past, who love the taste of blood (and may love the taste of punching people in the face even more). His kind have the potential to spread destruction and discord wherever they go. Lissa’s Baba, under great debt to him, was helping Maksim control his violent urges. With her passing, the threat his violent nature poses grows ever stronger. Lissa doesn’t have time to ease into her new title—she’s on a deadline to figure out how to leash Maksim’s rage before it destroys them all. What’s worse, he’s already infected someone else—Nick, a drunk university student in over his head, who has no idea what he’s now capable of unleashing. Naturally, he’s gone missing.
This all makes for absorbing escapism, helped along by a gaggle of supporting characters who seem to have no idea they are in a very dramatic urban fantasy, training their focus instead on stuff like pedicures, cute bartenders, and getting drunk with their best friends. Lissa’s stepsister and unwelcome housemate Stella provides wonderful comic relief, reminding us that Lissa’s daytime life matters just as much to her as moonlighting as the village witch. The newly infected Nick and his best friend Jonathan spend more of their pages fighting over the latter’s girlfriend asking him needling him to grow up (and then getting drunk and high anyway) than they do dealing with the magic clearly taking over Nick’s body. They are lovable, maybe a tad oblivious, but hey—we’re talking about preventing mass murder and destruction, but that’s no reason for things to get dreary.
The tick-tock plot is given a boost by evocative, atmospheric touches that make it easy to slide into this tangible, fantasy-tinged setting. The contrast between Lissa and Maksim’s worlds make it easy to imagine stepping into this adventure after a long day at work, just like Lissa—a double life of mundane days and neo-noir nights, filled with shattered glass, neon lights, bruises that no one cares to explain, and deadly magical creatures. While magic drives the narrative, it retains its mystery—we see the progress of a spell, but we never quite grasp the mythology behind why it works or how; we see the history of one being’s experience of kin, but their whole species is left in the shadows. It’s a wonderful way to experience this story: it doesn’t much matter how monsters exist; how do the monsters feel about being monsters?
Spells of Blood and Kin is available now.