Book Review: Creatures of Want and Ruin

Creatures of Want and Ruin by Molly Tanzer

I was hoping for an escapist adventure to take my mind of current events, and two women fighting demon-worshippers bent on the destruction of the world seemed like just the ticket. Ellie and Fin felt like genuine characters with significant stakes, and the setting (Long Island, NY in the 1920s) made me feel as though I were in a different time and place.

This is the second book in the “series” but you don’t have to have read the first book to make sense of it, because the characters are all entirely new and the setting is different. Only the worldbuilding and the way demons interact with the world is the same.

Ellie’s main conflict is with her father, who has abdicated his role as provider for the family, and wants to amp up his paternal control to make up for the shame his injury has caused him. Ellie’s brother Lester has a fine mind and a scholarship to medical school, although his father feels contempt for Lester, probably because Lester’s polio-weakened legs remind his father of his own war wound. There’s a lot of toxic masculinity in this. I think that the honor-culture of men with fragile male identities is as much of an antagonist as the mushroom-eating demon worshippers. The bad guys think foreigners are evil and ought to be eradicated (foreigner=second generation American rather than third or fourth generation) and that a woman’s proper place is under the thumb of her man. That Ellie’s fiance is poly and bi feels almost like a signal that he’s one of the good guys.

Fin’s story felt even more personal to me. She’s the wife of a newly-rich social climbing playboy who wants very much to hang out with the other rich people. She constantly feels like an unwelcome guest in her own home, and everyone keeps mistaking her for her husband’s sister instead of his wife, which incenses her. I felt her pain keenly, because the people she’s living with (her husband and “their” friends) constantly manufacture drama the way people ought to outgrow in their twenties but often don’t. She’d given up much of her identity to marry and live with people who never seemed to want her around or make her feel included. By the time she chooses to get involved with diabolism, she’d already lost most of her identity. I feel like you could have a whole novel just on her and it might be interesting enough to carry it.

Fin and Ellie’s friendship felt a bit rushed. That’s my main complaint about the novel. They get off on the wrong foot to begin with, and the second time they meet, they become friends so quickly that it felt more like it was necessary to the plot than a natural relationship. I also had a hard time liking Fin after she decides “my husband is ignoring me” is justification to sleep around behind his back. She sort of redeems herself with her sacrifice, but it’s hard to like someone who’s cheating on their spouse. That’s a mean thing to do to someone.

But, the plotting is good. The plotting felt a lot like a plot in the game Betrayal at House on the Hill, with some ordinary evil people planning something truly evil that was also plausible. Xenophobic reactionary cultists murder people to achieve their end of destroying the world because they got fooled by an evil leader who bamboozled them into following him by preaching to their hatred. Honestly, that part felt a little too close to the bone. But maybe that’s just because I read the news too much.


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