When we first meet Felix Castor, he’s performing magic at a children’s birthday party. But he’s not really there to pull a rabbit out of hat; that’s just a ruse for him to figure out which kid there is possessed. With such a nifty trick Mike Carey opens his debut novel, THE DEVIL YOU KNOW.

Castor is a freelance exorcist – an Englishman who uses a tin whistle of all things to draw out the spirits. He also shops at IKEA, helps his landlord out financially and has an institutionalized schizophrenic pal who warns Castor that the next job he takes certainly will result in his death.

That job is one at the Bonnington Archive, a library/museum type of place recently troubled with a vengeful spectre that lashed out at one of the employees – shades of GHOSTBUSTERS! Despite reservations, the cash-strapped Castor accepts the gig and encounters immediate resistance from one of the archivists, to the point where you think dealing with the ghost will be a comparative cake walk.

Make that ghosts, plural, as Castor also comes up against a variety of undead phantasms in his travels and travails.

But for all its promise, THE DEVIL YOU KNOW doesn’t deliver. Instead, it alternately amuses and frustrates. Castor’s first-person narration is all cheeky humor, but a little goes a long way, without much relief. The setup is a real tease, and I do mean setup, because halfway through – when, to be honest and transparent, I gave up and started skimming – so little had happened. When your book is 200 pages, that’s no big deal, but when you tip the scale at just over 400, it’s a real problem.

And that’s too bad, because Carey obviously is a writer with much imagination and a way with words. It’s just that the former is restrained when the latter is being overexercised coming up with fanicful paragraphs of whimsy. He’s known for his work in comics like LUCIFER and HELLBLAZER – and it’s hard not to read Castor without visualizing the equally droll and quirky John Constantine – so one imagines perhaps he went wild with the newfound freedom of fiction after so many years of being constrained by 21-page stories. –Rod Lott

Buy it at Amazon.