I’ll start this review with a confession: Horror fantasy is not my favorite subgenre. I find that fantasy worldbuilding can bog down the more mysterious, "fear of the unknown" factor that I personally find makes horror the strongest. As a result, I'd rather read a fantasy novel with horror elements that accentuate its darker world and story, rather than a horror novel that gets bogged down with world-building rules.

However, I did not go into this book expecting horror fantasy. Paranormal, obviously, but not the kind of dark fantasy you'd expect in something like, say, Underworld. With that said, I had high hopes going into this book. The concept is a juicy one: A corrupted guardian angel. A fantastic idea to build a horror story around.

Oh boy, was I disappointed by this one.

One of my biggest issues with the book is Compton’s writing style. He doesn’t so much tell you a story as he does explain it. There are many long, rambly passages that tell you about the characters and what they have going on without really showing it to you via scene. This is especially frustrating in high-stakes action scenes or dramatic emotional scenes. Something intense will be happening, and Comption will pump the breaks to spend 2-3 paragraphs chattering about what exactly the characters are feeling, a detail from their backstory, or something else that could either be implied or saved for less tense scenes.

All this makes the book's pacing a painful slog to get through. There is a sparse amount of dialogue in this book compared to chunky, ramble paragraphs that spend too much time inside the characters’ heads. At times, you feel like you're reading an in-depth Wikipedia description rather than a story.

This is especially apparent in Cela’s chapters. The first chapter we meet her has so much info-dumping and much of the information could have been more effectively communicated with scenes instead. Several times I caught my eyes glazing over and felt relief when there was a line of dialogue or action to break things up.

Which is a shame, because Cela is a fascinating character on paper. A centuries old being who has created her own religion (which appears to be bits and pieces of other religions stitched together) to create a mass of obedient followers. But so much of her story feels like it happens off camera, and her presence on the page is restricted by her time spent with Harrah.

(and yes, I was picturing Akasha whenever Cela appeared in the story)

The scope of the story changes drastically as it goes on. It starts out in a small, intimate place. Sarita’s husband is called by her lifelong guardian angel, and this creates a ripples affect across her family and her in-laws. I expected the story to stay in this scope, focusing on Sarita and her personal family conflict resulting from this murder. Made more complicated by the fact that Sarita is a woman of color and her in-laws are white and carry a very "I'm not racist buuuutttt...." kind of attitude.

But then the story keeps going and grows in scale drastically. We started to follow Harrah around, we meet Cela and her followers, we meet Myra and Z the rest of their family of survivors at Baby Head Mountain. What started as a more intimate story about one woman and her personal tragedy turned into an epic fantasy battle for the fate of humanity itself. From there the story gets more convoluted and I found myself missing the smaller story that was very well set up in the beginning.

As for the fantasy elements themselves, they feel underdeveloped. While the book's brain-aching pain makes it feel twice as long as it is, it also feels too short to adequately explore its world. This book simultaneously feels too long while also feeling like it could have benefitted from being longer. Less time on rambling musing and fan easy info-dumping, more times actually fleshing things out with scenes and dialogue. The book feels like story very different stories: An epic vampire fantasy that reminded me a little too much of Underworld, and a supernatural murder mystery between two families. Neither feel like the mesh together well here.

Since the story itself is pretty simple and book isn’t particularly long, you get the sense it could have been a novella or at least a much shorter novel if Compton trimmed the fat. At times reading this, it felt like a solid second or third draft. Long explanations of character and world building might be familiar in a draft as you figure out the story. But in the final product, it's just a pain to read through.

Overall, Devils Kill Devils is a classic case of a great premise with a lackluster execution. The pacing is sluggish due to Comption telling us info instead of showing us through scenes and the mythology feels underdeveloped. There's a solid story in this book, but it's buried under rambly, out-of-focus writing and a brain-numbingly sluggish pace.