Charming

July 1, 2013
James’s debut delivers a solid though sometimes familiar-feeling tale. Despite being descended from an illustrious line of monster killers, John Charming’s supernatural powers have led him to become a fugitive from the Knights Templar, who trained him. When a tall and unusually clean-smelling athletic blonde walks into John’s rural Virginia bar, John knows it’s time to run. But John can’t ignore his knightly training, and he delays to kill some vampires. The blonde Valkyrie named Sig saves his life, and something about her convinces John to stay and help her band of racially stereotyped monster hunters—including a pot-smoking exterminator, an Episcopalian ex-priest, an immoral Naga software mogul, and an Eastern European psychic—clean out the local vampire hive in a plot that sometimes feels boilerplate but eventually takes a darker, more personal twist.