Living Hell

Jerome Jameel has a secret.  This part time bartender is a former deity who became trapped in Hell as a demon, and then escaped to our plane twenty years ago.  He met a good, if troubled, woman, they got married, had a kid and now struggle to make ends meet as they live a loving life in their apartment.  However, Hell doesn’t forget and its Shepherd has finally come to take Jerome back.  One bloody confrontation later, though, and Jerome finds himself with his pursuer’s old job.  Now it’s Jerome’s obligation to track down all the other demons like him, or else those closest to him will face the consequences.

Creator Caitlin Yarsky wasn’t someone who was on my radar before I read this.  I just liked the idea of a demon hunter who’s also a demon himself and thought I’d check it out.  What I got was something that was both surprising and disappointing.  Surprising in how well the creator establishes these characters and their world.  The interactions between Jerome, his daughter, his wife, and the rest of the cast feel believable and are a lot of fun to see in action.  Yarsky’s art is also smooth and appealing, capable of delivering a lived-in domestic life for its protagonist, as well as supernatural thrills like a voodoo zombie battle in a graveyard.

The disappointment comes in how Jerome’s story over the course of this volume is just one big downer.  You’d think that it’d involve him struggling to fulfill the terms of his new job while trying (and succeeding) to find a way out of it.  While I don’t want to give too much away, the resolution Yarsky comes up with doesn’t satisfy at all, and that’s after it goes big in a way that feels at odds with how the story has been delivered up to that point.  What’s here is still good enough that I keep thinking of ways that it could’ve been better even though I can’t quite recommend it to everyone.  It does, at least, make me want to see what Yarsky does next and see if it delivers on the promise shown here.