What I liked most about ‘White Trash Warlock‘ was that it took the time to establish the personality and history of Adam Binder, the central character in David Slayton’s Urban Fantasy trilogy.

The depth of Adam’s characterisation grounded the book. Adam grew up in dire poverty in a trailer in the woods of Oklahoma, with a physically and emotionally abusive father who was capable of acts of extreme violence. Adam felt stigmatised and isolated in his early teens both because he felt he needed to keep his sexual orientation secret and because his reaction to the things his his uncontrolled magical Sight showed him, marked him out as crazy in the eyes of his peers and distracted him from daily life. Adam’s family issues, not just with his father but with his mother and his older brother ran deep and dark.

Engaging me in Adam’s blighted childhood and showing me how it had shaped him, made him feel real, which, in turn, made it easier to accept the reality of his magical abilities and the world it allows him to see.

I liked that Adam wasn’t a kick-ass superhero. He regards himself as a man with only minor magical abilities, spending his life at the edges of two worlds – the mundane one where he’s just another guy with no education and no money trying to get along and the magical one which he can see but has little ability to influence. He’s a man who is used to being sidelined and ignored and who has no expectations of belonging.

I also liked that the secondary characters were well-drawn – Adams I’ve got-my-perfectly-oridinary-suburban-life-together-and-left-the trailer-in-the-woods-behind-me-brother, Vic the police officer who becomes Adam’s love interest and the two main Fae characters, a brother and sister pair, who come across as engaging and relatable while remaining non-human and dangerous.

To me, the magic system Adam operates in felt stronger because the real-world grounding was so firm and because the plot revolved around the fate of people whom Adam cares about. The visualisations of the use of magic are clear, dramatic and sometimes so surprising that they feel hallucinogenic,

The plot works but it isn’t the main focus of the story. Yes, it’s important to save the denizens of Denver on both planes of existence from destruction by the Big Bad but the main journey is Adam coming to terms with who he is and what has been done to him and by whom and then deciding what or who he is willing to sacrifice to defeat the Big Bad.

I finished the book feeling that I’d gotten to know Adam and the people around him and that I wanted to see what would happen to them next, so ‘Trailer Park Trickster‘ is now in my TBR pile.

I listened to the audiobook version of ‘White Trash Warlock’, ably narrated by Michael David Astell. I liked the voices that he gave to each of the characters and admired his ability to give the text the right tone and pace. Click on the SoundCloud link below to hear a sample.