The Darker Saints

Behind the walls of respectability is a world exploding with crime, sin, and the darkest magic of all. The rain beats down on the hot New Orleans streets. A derelict staggers, no longer a man, but a zombie, a vessel emptied by voodoo sorcery and poured full of another's will.

This is the land of lace curtains and Mardi Gras. This is the world of the bayou, and sizzling crawfish, and a man in white who can kill at any distance.

A storm of corporate greed and cruel vengeance is sweeping through New Orleans, descending on a young advertising executive (Nightlife‘s Justin Gray), who fears he may be selling his soul along with brand names, a weary ex-CIA agent, and a Caribbean chauffeur on the run from enemies he can't understand.

Two powerful businessmen, one legitimate, the other a criminal, have built a common empire. Now it is coming apart in a tidal wave of bloodshed and shattered lives, flooding the Delta with voodoo - the dark magic of darker saints.

PRAISE FOR THE DARKER SAINTS:

“Southern Louisiana is always a terrifically atmospheric setting for hot, humid, moldering, multicultural horror. Hodge uses his setting well...moves along with the speed of an airboat skimming a steaming bayou. The action's hot, the magic is dark, and you start getting a little sorry for Justin, considering all the shit he gets into in the space of just two novels... This is a quite literate edge of night in which the morning apparently never comes.” (Ed Bryant, in Locus)

“You've got the spicy ingredients for a dish so intense and uncompromising, it'll leave your eyes stinging... If you're tired of predictable horror yarns, then step into Hodge's dark and obsessive world, where lovers circle each other like enemies, brothers see murder as a tool of capitalism, and ancient voodoo gods descend to earth to possess willing subjects. Hodge's work often emphasizes that the real world can be scarier than the supernatural. The Darker Saints stands as a mature and fully realized vision of what it's like to be young and confused, and you can't get much scarier than that.” (Insider)