Madeline's Reviews > Last Call at the Nightshade Lounge

"College grad Bailey Chen has all of the usual new-adult demons: no cash, no job offers, and a rocky relationship with Zane, the only friend still around when she moves back home. But her demons become a lot more literal when Zane introduces Bailey to his cadre of monster-fighting bartenders."

I appreciate that the description for this novel doesn't pull any punches about how straight-up silly the premise is, and doesn't try to dress it up as something more complex than it is: this is a book about bartenders who fight demons, aided by mixing cocktails with magic liquors that give them enhanced abilities. If that's not your jam, you can move on.

Krueger's heroine is Bailey Chen, who, with no other job prospects, gets hired as a barback in a Chicago bar run by her friend's uncle. One night after work, Bailey finds an unlocked cabinet of mysterious liquors and mixes herself what she assumes is an ordinary screwdriver. Walking home, she is attacked by a demon called a tremens, and fights it off because the drink she mixed gave her temporary super-strength (the magical cocktails' powers always last an hour, because it takes one hour to metabolize the alcohol in one drink - very clever, Krueger). Then Bailey's friend Zane tells her the truth: he's part of an ancient and secret society of bartenders who use mixology to help them fight demonic forces. Bailey convinces Zane to let her join up, and soon she's learning to use magical liquor to fight evil.

Obviously, this is a fantastically dumb concept for a fantasy story (if only for its central concept, that alcohol enhances your abilities instead of hindering them, but I guess that's part of the joke), but that shouldn't turn you off reading it. After all, you can start with an incredibly dumb premise and make it into something great - I call it the Pacific Rim paradox. And overall, Krueger's book is fun, demon-fighting, magic-making good time. We got gruff blind mentors, awkward romantic tension, wisecracking sidekicks, scheming villains...often, the book reads like a fun episode of Buffy the Vampire Slayer or Supernatural.

I liked a lot about this book, honestly. Krueger sprinkles the book with chapters from a fictional guide to magical bartending, and they're a good mix of real cocktail information and fun made-up history. (I want an entire book about Hortense LaRue, the French amateur bartender who amazed the competitors at the first National Symposium of the Cupbears Court in 1852 by being the first person to add an orange peel to an old fashioned) The fight scenes are coherent and exciting, and the tremens are well-drawn and scary. The supporting characters, while sometimes grating (Paul Krueger's dialogue isn't nearly as funny as he thinks it is), were similarly fleshed-out and entertaining.

It's not perfect, though. There's a running subplot dealing with Bailey's romantic past with Zane, and it falls flat at every opportunity because the two characters have, like, negative chemistry. I didn't even really buy them as friends, much less two people who have apparently been romantically pining for each other for years. The two of them keep dancing around a huge fight they had years ago that was a huge turning point for their friendship, but by the time we finally learn what happened in The Fight, it lacks weight and importance. Also Zane has a girlfriend for most of the book, a girl named Mona, and I'm pretty sure we're supposed to dislike her, because other women are competition, right ladies? The problem is that Mona is so goddamn cool, and I didn't want her to break up with Zane so Bailey could date him - I wanted Mona to break up with Zane because he's not good enough for her. Mona is a goddamn demon-fighting queen, and also she reminded me of Rosa Diaz on Brooklyn Nine-Nine.

And even though the fight scenes are good, there's a weird mental disconnect when it comes to the violence involved in slaying demons. The ways that Bailey kills demons are almost disturbingly graphic (in one scene, she kills a tremens by psychically forcing a chunk of concrete down its throat, choking it to death), but she doesn't seem affected by it at all. She's afraid of the tremens the first time she sees them; after that, she brutally kills them with an ease and detachment that rang very false for me. Remember, Bailey is brand new at this - slaying mythical monsters should not be this ho-hum for her yet!

Speaking of moments that rang false - I should mention here that I'm a bartender in real life, and so I spent way too much time picking at Krueger's portrayal of the industry and looking for mistakes. I honestly can't tell if Krueger has worked as a bartender or not, because even though most of the bar scenes seemed accurate, there were a lot of little details that nagged at me. Like, in one scene Bailey is working at the bar, and it mentions that customers are ordering "drinks that Bailey barely knew how to make - shooters, twisters, Jack and Cokes..." Uh, what? She doesn't know how to make a Jack and Coke? The drink where the ingredients are literally in the name?

(also apparently the one supreme all-powerful magical cocktail is...the Long Island Iced Tea. Reader, I almost spat out my drink when I read that. Long Island Iced Teas are garbage drinks for garbage people, and most bartenders I know practically wince when they have to make one.)

I have to take issue with one of the core aspects of the book, when Bailey learns how being a bartender/demon hunter works. So she's expected to work at the bar serving normal drinks to normal people, and then periodically mix herself a magic cocktail and go out into the neighborhood to patrol for tremens. How does she disappear from the bar, and what is assumed to be her only job? The demon-fighting bartenders excuse themselves on the pretense of taking a smoke break. That's it. You're expected to walk around the neighborhood, locate a tremens, slay the tremens, and go back to the bar, all in the time it takes to smoke a cigarette.

I don't smoke (despite what my profile picture may suggest to people who don't know it's from a movie), but I've worked with enough people who do, and I can tell you that (at least in the service industry) a smoke break is fifteen minutes, max. I simply do not believe that a bartender in this universe can do everything that patrol involves, all in the space of a smoke break.

And honestly, I think Krueger missed an opportunity here. What if it was the barbacks who went demon hunting, I remember thinking to myself? Wouldn't that make so much more sense? The bartender mixes the magic cocktail and gives it to the barback, and they go out slaying demons while the bartender stays behind and takes care of customers. It's perfect, because a) customers don't really notice barbacks, so they wouldn't think it was weird when one disappeared for a long period of time, and b) it fits in with the idea of barbacks being the unobtrusive but vital backup to the bartenders. I think it would have been really cool to explore that relationship in the context of demon-fighting-bartenders (similar to how Krueger establishes that coffee has healing properties, making bartenders and baristas natural allies), but oh well. Maybe in a sequel.

(Note: the copy I have is an ARC that was given to me by a fellow reader, so quoted passages may be different in the final published version)