Review: OUR FRAIL, DISORDERED LIVES by Mary M. Schmidt

Larry Kavanaugh is an ordinary kind of guy. He's got a nagging wife and two kids, both annoyingly gifted. No matter what he does, there is no end to what his family needs. What's a regular, everyday guy to do? Well, he cuts a few corners, obviously-one very big corner in particular. He sells his soul to the Devil. Maybe it's not the actual Devil, but Larry is ready to make a deal with one of the Devil's minions. He meets some demon whose name he can't remember. Funny, it was right on the tip of his tongue, a name of something you step on. Roach the Demon has sort of good intentions. He just wants a re-write of Dante's Inferno with himself as the star. Roach goes after Larry as a rogue operation. He needs to make a point to his boss, Satan, so he uses the body of a human to follow Larry around and stir up trouble. He offers Larry an airtight guarantee that nothing could possibly go wrong. After all, Larry doesn't feel like he has much to lose-or does he? Even Roach might be in over his head this time.

Review: “It’s never easy hearing that the boss wants to see you right away…especially if your boss is the devil himself.”

First of all, I must admit that the gigantic eye on the cover was a bit unsettling for me. I mean, I don’t even know what animal that was—a wolf or an owl or something? I didn’t even see any reference to it in the story. It was just a big, giant eye.

I liked how the story generated the setting of an uncouth office in Hell, working for the devil to contract willing and unsuspecting souls. We then focus on Roach, a tired, overworked demon working for the (evil) man. Stuck with immortality with nowhere to go, he then decides to flee his responsibilities and escapes to the surface. Now, he’s on the run and in hiding with demonic bounty hunters on his tail. I think this was a pretty good, strong start in the story, and I would’ve liked to have seen Roach battling out with bounty hunters and evading the devil’s trail, making it more of an adventure/thriller story.

Instead, the story divides into several points of view—one of which, was Kathleen, the nagging wife of Kavannaugh, who sold his soul to the devil. I wasn’t sure how her story intersected with Roach, whom I thought was the main character in this book.  The reader gets other points of view from Dorothy and Grace (don’t really know who these characters were either) while Roach continued to spread evil by planting subliminal messages in humans. This really didn’t go anywhere for me. Instead, it became rather confusing. I think it lacked cohesiveness—that thread that bounded these characters together. I would’ve liked a simpler story with more focus on Roach. I think his perspective was probably the most interesting out of the whole thing. I would’ve liked to learn more about what it was like to work for the devil.

My rating: 2.5 stars