It is early morning, and the two of them have just come from a murder. He is wearing a dead man’s uniform and has not washed his hands. On the pavement outside a camera shop, an eleven-year-old in a teal uniform stops them with a trolley of charity cookie boxes, proceeds to the children’s hospital. He asks for five. She says thirty dollars. He says twenty. She says twenty-five. He hands over a wad of cash, takes the boxes in one hand, eats a single cookie, throws the remaining four boxes in a bin, and walks into the shop. When the narrator asks, baffled, whether demons are allowed to like cookies, he wants to know who told her the homeless are not allowed to like them either. Cursed City by Kate Golden spends four hundred pages insisting this man has no morality, and roughly four hundred pages proving otherwise.
What Cursed City Is Actually About
The plot is straightforward enough to summarise. Vivienne Cadell is a hunter at a hidden college in a city split down the middle by a canyon, and the previous book ended with the deadliest spell in this world carved into her spine. The rules of it are neat: whoever kills her absorbs its power and goes permanently insane, and a host nobody kills goes insane anyway, in three or four months. She is therefore the safest person in the city and the one with the least time.
The man she loves is in the hands of the mob. The only creature strong enough to retrieve him is his estranged brother, who owns a nightclub, sells guns, drinks souls, and happens to be the one person unable to murder her. Cursed City by Kate Golden runs on that pairing and very little else.
But the plot is not what makes this worth a group’s evening. What makes it worth the evening is the argument going on underneath it, and the fact that the novel loses that argument in an interesting way.
The Household
The middle of the book relocates Viv into the nightclub, and this is where Cursed City by Kate Golden comes alive.
Fever Dream turns out not to be a den of iniquity but a home. Upstairs there is a kitchen, a rooftop pool, a private cinema with a library of film reels, and a hallway of rooms where the staff live. A vampire restocks a bar and admits, grudgingly, that his name means something like may the lord protect the king. A werewolf watches romantic comedies and threatens the television when the heroine will not forgive anybody. An acrobat cries at the screen. Viv’s best friend paints portraits of all of them. Her dog starts sleeping in the crime lord’s bed.
Into this, mid-novel, walks a teenage sex worker the two of them save from a vampire. She is offered a job, room and board, and the guarantee that nobody will touch her, and she takes it. She is cooking breakfast for everybody three chapters later.
That is the novel’s real position, and nobody in it says a word about it. Every character keeps announcing that there are no good guys, that morality is a fiction, that the narrator should stop looking for decency in a monster. Meanwhile the monster is running the only functional family in the book.
Cursed City, Kate Golden, and the Thing in Her Back
The other reason to bring this to a group is the spell itself, the best thing Cursed City by Kate Golden has, and one of the better metaphors going in the genre.
It heightens everything she already was. Her senses sharpen until she can identify who is nearby, not merely what. Her appetite for killing goes from a professional instinct to a compulsion that arrives as physical pain and only stops when she has killed something. It costs her control, then her sleep, then her grip on what is real: she starts seeing her dead father in corners of rooms, telling her to go and hunt.
The novel’s cleverest move is what this does to her friendships. After one episode outside an asylum, she looks up from what she has done and sees, in the faces of the two people she loves most, not concern but fear. She never forgets it. She spends the rest of the book negotiating with an illness that makes her a danger to the people she is trying to protect, and quietly deciding what she will do if it gets worse.
Where Cursed City by Kate Golden gives ground:
- The romance question is settled long before any character will admit it. Anyone hoping for genuine suspense about who she ends up beside is in for a patient wait.
- There is a long stretch after the midpoint that amounts to a research montage without the montage: people read, telephone each other, and report failure.
- The corrupt-establishment thread is the freshest idea in the series, and it is raised, confirmed, and then parked until the next volume.
- When the last act finally starts spending characters, it spends them fast. One loss gets barely a page before the book moves on.
For the Group
Cursed City by Kate Golden hands a group its first question, so start there. Ask the room to list what the demon actually does across the novel, and then what he says about himself, and see which list is longer. Then ask the harder version: does a private code that protects your own people and nobody else count as morality at all?
Then the spell. If you have read anything in the last decade about living with a condition that changes your temper before it changes anything else, this will land differently for you than for the person beside you. Ask whether the book is using the syrabraxa as an illness, a curse, or an addiction, and whether it knows.
Then the best friend, who deserves more credit than she gets. She spends the first book being lied to for her own protection and the second one refusing to be protected: following the hunters when told not to, fighting a monster with a wooden spoon, declining to be flown abroad for her own safety, and saying out loud that the boyfriend everybody is mourning has not actually behaved well. A group will argue about whether she is right, which is the point of her.
Content notes: extended torture including flaying and the removal of fingernails and teeth; soul-taking treated as permanent damnation; a private club where narcotics and consensual pain play are the entertainment, one scene of which the narrator watches through a door; involuntary sedation; graphic injury; an animal killed and eaten; a parent’s murder recalled throughout; a mother’s exile and long imprisonment; suicide discussed as a tactic; explicit sex; and constant profanity.
More for the group: A Reign of Rose by Kate Golden is the end of her other trilogy and the better demonstration of how she lands a plot, If Not for My Baby by Kate Golden prints its opening chapter at the end of this book and could hardly be less alike, Roll for Romance by Lenora Woods is the gentler pick if the torture is too much, and The Complete Guide to Fantasy Book Tropes is worth a look before you argue about which ones this book is using deliberately.
Where It Leaves You
One detail in Cursed City by Kate Golden is worth sitting with. The neighbourhood where this hunter grew up, where her father was killed and where she goes to hunt when she cannot sleep, is called Lethe. The bridge over the canyon is Erebos, the password at the sex club is Tartarus, and the demons ferry souls downward the way the old stories had them ferried across the Styx. Lethe is the river of forgetting, and a woman losing her mind by inches lives on top of it.
Whether that is design or decoration is a fair question for a group, and Cursed City by Kate Golden is the kind of book that will take the credit either way. What it unambiguously earns is the last forty pages, which are faster and crueller than anything before them, and an ending that resolves the central threat and then removes something readers will not have expected to lose. Be warned: this is the middle book of three, it assumes you have read the first, and it stops rather than ends. Read it with people who will be happy to spend twenty minutes shouting about a final chapter, because that is what the final chapter is for.