This novella has everything I could want: Tough leading lady with a chip on her shoulder and emotional walls that would rival those of some bougie gated community for the obscenely, underhandedly wealthy. Seedy magical underground run by entities straight out of Jemaine Clement’s fevered imaginings. Cronenbergian monstrosities that play mind games with their prey.
It even has a possible (spoiler, highlight to read) (friends-to-enemies-to-grudging partners-to-partner partners pairing) (end of spoiler)
Welcome Home by Jon D. Arthur is pretty standard as far as narrative premises go – in a world much like our own, filled with the same economic inequalities and generational baggage and disenchanted twenty-something, there also lurks a much, much more dangerous magical dimension rife with fear-demons and oversized flesh-devouring pseudo-crabs.
One of the blessed (or cursed, depending on whether your thoughts on super-powered heroism align more with Stan Lee or Alan Moore) individuals charged with protecting hapless people from both knowledge of and murder by this marauding monsters is Francine “Frankie” Bounds.
Our plucky heroine left her home in small-town Taio, New Zealand five years before the start of the novella, in pursuit of that time-honored search for adventure and opportunity that strikes the heart of most LGBTQ+ young adults looking for a place where they can feel “normal”. But in the shady heart of Auckland, she stumbled upon something that skewered any possibility she had of being normal, in most accepted senses of the word.
Now, with a few years of monster hunting and failed relationships under her belt, she’s come back home, ready to finally face the literal and metaphorical shadows that have been dogging her steps. And while our smart-mouthed, unapologetic protagonist isn’t exactly the best at building back burned bridges, she’s going to find out that sometimes love lies in the most foreboding places.
Namely, in a very tall, very buff boxing instructor named Charlotte. Whose boyfriend cheated on her with Frankie back in high school.
(If you ever thought that love triangles could be easily resolved by both the much more interesting love interests ditching the milquetoast main for each other, this novella is going to make you feel so validated.)
But as much as I enjoyed it, there were a handful of spelling errors that yanked me out of the story in places. It is worth noting that this is a self-published book that spins a narrative centering people whose particular intersection of identities don’t often find representation on major publishing lists, which is one of the reasons why I also felt a bit disappointed in the lack of description and world-building provided. Granted, it is a novella, and one with interesting characters to boot, but I guess this is where the subjectivity of reviewing comes into play. If relationships are what keep you hooked, though, this novella sets up quite a few promising ones I would love to see the author explore more in subsequent books!
(Meaning, if you were one of those people who wanted more moments of levity between Buffy and Giles or more moments of heartfelt communication and maybe kissing between Buffy and Faith, this series is promising.)