King of Hell by Christopher Golden
My rating: 5 of 5 stars

Where can the hell this series go after having already had multiple trips to hell and back?

One way, of course.

Peter lost everything that gave him happiness thanks to a certain Gaia-Avatar and all his friends are stuck in hell. All the gates are closed. He's considering a pogrom of burning and salting the earth to get Gaia to let him through the locked gates to pull back all the heroic Shadows caught on the other side. And everyone he cares for, for that matter, but doing so would leave him utterly unwelcome on the whole planet. Deeply unwelcome.

So for most of this novel we need to find a way out, meet up with some demons, kill even more, and have an epic battle between totally overpowered vampires (shadows) and all the denizens of hell. Oh, and Lazarus, too. :) He seems to have been stuck in hell for longer than Peter and learned quite a few magic tricks.

As a conclusion to the Shadow Saga, it's one hell of a blow-out action extravaganza. The horror bits are beautifully disgusting and creative, the cinema of the mind's eye is so much better than practically any other novel including a trip to hell, and the special effects budget is totally infernal.

Being relatively short, it makes up any kind of character-building lack by acting almost like a beefed -up direct-continuation of the previous novel and could easily have been combined without any lack. It might have been slightly large, but who cares when the action movie is this good?

Huge magic battles, hoards of demons, matter-manipulating vampires, you might not realize this is a prototypical good UF and not an epic fantasy/horror, but it is. :)

My only complaint is that it's done now. ; ;

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