Faithless: Book One of the Alyce Kerr, Faith Healer Trilogy (2009)

Faithless: Book One of the Alyce Kerr, Faith Healer Trilogy
Written by Yolanda Sfetsos
Damnation Books
Reviewed by Alan Kelly

Someone forgot to tell the heroine of Yolanda Sfetsos' new horror novella Faithless, Alyce Kerr, that the road to the New Age success story is one that’s always been paved with bad intentions. It is clear from the outset that the character has never rented out The Craft or seen an episode of Buffy which features Willow...

First and foremost: Any reader who does take a gander at this will wonder if the writer broke into Aaron Spelling’s bedroom and ransacked his depository of early drafts of Charmed scripts. So if that show tickled your fancy places, you’re in for a treat. If not, well this is best avoided.

Alyce conjures the demonic Bauer, who is occasionally a putrid thing with many arms and sometimes a hairy centaur that is kind of hot - the character thought so at one point anyway. Bauer uses Alyce (is this a fancy way to spell Alice because when I say it out loud all I hear is Alky?) as a conduit at spiritualism type junkets to heal the blind and people struck down with brain tumours (mostly children) – while she is delivering them from illness, the demon uses his slimy nails to lacerate her arms and other such body parts – Oh did I mention he is slowly sucking a subplot from the fourth season of Buffy (the one where Buffy’s college roommate is taking her soul bit by bit?) - well this demon obviously has more than a surface understanding of genre television, unlike poor Alky – whose only respite from Bauer is getting plastered with vodka and bumping into her former ex-boyfriend and being mesmerized by his Olive skin and longish hair, completely forgetting that the same man tried to knife her in the face while she slept – there was a restraining order mentioned, but of course, all is forgiven when she tilts her head just so.

Following this is one of the most cringey cloaked sex sequences – I was so nauseated I could’ve thrown up on my MOTHER! This is the funniest post-coital comment from a man I’ve ever heard: “He did that while we where sharing intimacy’. Back to Alky, after her and Ross have shared intimacy, Bauer shows up (after Mr Olive Hair has chained Alky up for no good reason) there is a two sentence confrontation wherein both Alky’s legs are broken, Bauer is banished back to the Brian Yuzna set-piece he crawled off and Alky suffers hospitalization – but she does get to live in a lovely little cottage in the suburbs with Mr Olive – did I mention their was a brain tumour she inherited from one of the thankless children? Bauer was supposed to consume it before he evaporated.

This author would be a multi-millionaire if she’d submitted this to the Mills & Boon Nocturne division. When the realisation dawned on me that the slim actually quite good looking little book was about witchcraft and part of a trilogy of novellas I expected a portentous long-winded agonising introduction on new agey absorption. Yet I was still unpleasantly surprised to discover the writing just way to shy of sharp. The character of Alky is well-drawn and maybe this will be the saving grace of the next two instalments although other than greed, her motivations are never made clear enough for the reader to care, a consequence of this is that she is appears rather stupid and selfish.

I did forget to ask ‘Is this a YA novella'?