Title: Well Hexed: A Dixie Tricks Story
Publisher/Author: Jaime Munn
Pages: 49pp
Price: free
Welcome to New Ys. Not really so very different from our own world. Well, okay, demons are known to ride electricity into people’s homes and wireless into their phones, so no one leaves the toaster on and phones have to be regularly blessed or otherwise enchanted to keep them free of demon dick pics. And all the taxi cabs are driven by Coptic priests, who chant the entire way to keep the internal combustion engine from cracking open and allowing demons out into the world. And while witches can be good, grimoires are very very bad …. And now there is one loose in New Ys …. Dixie Tricks is a woman of many hidden talents. A courtesan by night, by day she works as a monster hunter witch hunter or vampire hunter; basically, if it needs to be tracked and potentially killed, Dixie is your girl. Unfortunately, this unidentified witch and her unidentified grimoire may be more than even Dixie can handle ….
I’m always on the look out for new urban fantasy to read. When I stumbled across Well Hexed* through a Bookfunnel promotion, I was intrigued by the description and decided to give it a chance. I’m glad that I did.
The world that Munn has created is colorful to say the least. He basically threw everything at the wall, and everything stuck. Witches, vampires, demons, priests and priestesses, magic, superheroes and sorcerers and supernormal DNA, God and Goddess and Deities and Saints of every description — they all exist here. So do Ke$ha, soap operas, smart phones, and Dolce and Gabbana. There is also an absolute immortal Empress (ruthless, but not evil), an Inquisitor (license to kill anything and anyone), and a Serene Sisterhood of Compassion (Goddess-worshipping demon hunters). It’s a fantastic, dizzying carnival and I look forward to exploring it further.
I have only one complaint about Well Hexed, which is both personal and technical. Munn loves run-on sentences. The story is told from Dixie’s limited first person point of view; it’s an adventure that she is reciting to the reader, and she loves to go on at great length about everything from fashion to her favorite Taser. I found these run-on sentences, and the lack of punctuation, to be mildly irksome, but they probably won’t bother other readers as much.
Well Hexed is a terrific introduction to the world of Dixie Tricks. It is fun, fast, and witty. Recommended to fans of RJ Blain, T. Thorn Coyle, Celine Jeanjean, and Lindsay Buroker.
[Reviewed by Rebecca Buchanan.]