Sigil Fire by Erzabet Bishop

Sigil Fire
by Erzabet Bishop
Pages: 104
Date: June 8 2014
Publisher: Ylva Publishing
Series: Sigil Fire (1st in series)

Review
Rating: 3.23
Read: October 26 2016

This book stars a succubus and a vampire/blood witch. And, depending if you consider someone with a POV as a star or not, others. One issue with this book is the huge number of POV's involved.

So - someone or something has been killing women - sucking them dry (of soul). Fairly quickly (as in immediately) it is realized that all of the women have at least one thing in common - all of them were supposed to be immortal - all of them are succubus demons (in the past I've seen people get around the question of 'what is the plural of succubus' but having singular or plural forms of demon; here, if I read things right, they go with succubi).

Several succubus demons pop up in this story - Jeannie, Gina, um, others, but most importantly - Sonia (one of the two main stars). Jeannie and Sonia were linked as 'almost girlfriends', though being succubi, both still needed to feed off of humans - though Sonia tried as hard as she could to limit her feeding. Gina and Sonia are linked as being friends. All but Sonia seemed to be there so they could pop in for a minute or two, say 'hi', then go and die. Ah sorry, forgot Charley. She's also a succubus, but unlike all the others (except for Sonia who works as a fetish model), Charley works as a homicide detective (the others work in either a strip club or strip clubs - we only seemed to see the one club so unclear).

Charley's partner is a vampire. And while both are in the story, pop up, do things, and stuff, neither are as important to the story as expected.

Then there's Fae - tattoo artist, lesbian, witch (blood), and - not to be forgotten - vampire. She's the other main character.

I was enjoying the book, liking most of the people I came across until something snapped. Not exactly sure what, exactly, but suddenly Fae's making mean nasty comments about everyone around her (mostly about the succubus demons) and other characters started doing mean things. And the story took a turn for the worse because of that. Oh right - Sonia, despite everything, suddenly started being flippant, and acting all 'I don't need to follow your advice, it's stupid' and stuff.

This is the fifth story I've read by Bishop, and the first separate thingie (all others were short stories in anthologies). I, in general, have liked the stories I've read, but had been reluctant to read a book by Bishop because there seemed to be about 8,000 of them (well, really "94 distinct works"), and many seemed to look, on the surface, like they might be MF. Or MM for that matter. So I was happy enough when I saw that Ylva had a sale going on based on Halloween - the second story in the series was free (and I picked it up immediately), and this one here was $0.99. I didn't pick it up immediately (for reasons - mostly involving how Ylva requires payment via Paypal (it's true you can 'use your credit card', it's still through Paypal, and I don't want anything to do with Paypal), but I eventually went ahead and got it.

There's a vague and weird connection to another series - that being Loreli Brown's Belladonna Ink series - mostly because both series seem to be internally linked (as in the stories inside the individual series) through tattoos (though I still don't see how exactly the first book in that Belladonna Ink series has anything really to do with ink, but whatever). Random thoughts that occur - two different lesbian series that appear to have stories that are linked based solely on ink (well, also being in the same internal universe (as in, the two series themselves are not linked to each other).

Wow, I got way off the story there. Right, so - okay story. Lots of characters. Not really sure why there were so many, they got their brief moments to shine - show characterization, then fade into the background to not be worthy of further story or die.

I'll read the next story in this series, though somewhat more because I've liked stories by Bishop before, and I already own it.

Rating: 3.23

October 26 2016