#arin's supernatural novel reviews

[twobluecows]

The Supernatural Novel Series

"Witches Canyon" Review, written by Jeff Mariotte

For those of you who don't know, there is an official Supernatural novel series with 17 books in total.

I have my hands on 5.

I just finished reading "Witches Canyon" which is the second book in the series, here is my spoiler-free review.

Rating: 2/5

The story takes place during season two, specifically early December 2006. The boys are investigating a 40-year ghost-murder cycle in Cedar Wells, Arizona, which is brought to their attention via John's journal. They meet some side characters, namely the town Sheriff, a woman named Juliet, and old man Harmon Baird who all are involved with the hunt in some way.

One of my main questions when going into this series was "how do these stories fit into the canon, if at all?" This book fits nicely into the main canon, it is just another hunt the boys go on. There is no outstanding plot hole that goes unanswered.

Overall this book is boring, which makes me sad to say. It took a while for the hunt to really pick up, and we didn't spend much time with Sam and Dean. Additionally, many of the ghosts they were fighting were Native American, and were consistently being referred to as 'Indians'. Both of which are cause the loss of points in my rating.

There were some funny lines and moments from the boys:

Off topic, but someone, and I'm not naming names (The dog) (Shortie) took a gentle nibble out of my copy.

This has been the first addition of Arin's Supernatural Novel Reviews, 16 more to come.

[twobluecows]

Supernatural “Heart of the Dragon” by Keith R.A. DeCandido

This is the second installment of my reviews of the Supernatural novel series, here is the first.

"Heart of the Dragon" is the fourth book in the series, and takes place shortly after season fives episode Changing Channels. (there is a historians note in the beginning of the book.)

Rating: 3/5 (getting better!)

This story follows another ghost murder cycle, this time it is every 20 years and takes place in Chinatown, San Francisco. We follow Sam and Dean in 2009, John in 1989, and Samuel, Deanna, and Mary Campbell in 1969 as everyone tries to get rid of the ghost and demon on the same hunt.

First things first, this book has some insanely racist shit through (mainly) the first third of the book, and it nearly pushed me to DNF when I first began. The author consistently uses dated slurs for Chinese and Japanese Americans throughout making the story overall plain awful and difficult to read. This book is well written and interesting in other respects, and it is great in regards to it being a story about Supernatural. If you’re going to read it be careful and know what you’re getting into. That all being said, it is impossible to ignore the racist bullshit so I’m docking two points.

Other than that, this story caught me off guard with how well it handled the Campbells and John's perspectives. In the main SPN canon we don't know much about Deanna, other than she was just kind of there, in this story she is fleshed out more and is really a badass. Samuel and John are paralleled a lot between their two perspectives, both being generally bad fathers who raised their children in constant danger. In the 1989 sections we also get a glimpse of Bobby caring for a young Dean and Sam, which made me very teary-eyed. Oh, and bonus points for Cas appearances, while they were few and far between I enjoyed them.

Overall this story was a great dive into characters we didn't see much of in the main series, and an expansion of what we already knew about John's A+ parenting. If you decide to read this book precede with caution, as mentioned before it comes with a heaping of racist BS in the beginning.

Here are some quotes from the story that I want to highlight:

2 books done. . . 15 more to go. . . (Btw I’m on spring break so I have been doing nothing but reading and petting my dog, so on to the next one!)

Oh, and Shortie tried to eat this one too.