I picked up Mike Carey’s new book The Naming of The Beasts, the fifth book in the Felix Castor series, on the release day September 10th and was lucky enough to get it signed by Mike Carey himself. As I’ve noted in my posts on the previous books in the series (The Devil You Know, Vicious Circle, Dead Men’s Boots and Thicker Than Water), the books’ premise is one parallel to our own world except that the Earth has been hunted by ghosts, zombies, lycanthropes and demons for over a decade. The protagonist is one Felix Castor a street smart ex-exorcist turned “spiritual adviser”, which is just a fancy way of saying he’s a exorcist who cares for the super natural creatures feelings and tries to understand them and their reason for being.

NOTE: In this post I will try not to spoil The Naming Of The Beasts but will contain extensive spoilers for the previous books in the series.

The Naming of The Beasts focuses on Castor’s quest to help his friend Rafi who has been possessed by a demon and his soul bound with the demon’s essence as Castor tried to exorcise the demon a few years prior but failing miserably. At the end of the last book, Thicker Than Water, the demon Asmodeus in Rafi’s body had just escaped the custody Castor had placed him in after an failed exorcism by extremist Christian exorcists. To try and capture Asmodeus once more and hope to exorcise him from Rafi’s body, Castor is forced to enlist the help of Professor Mulbridge and her squad of exorcists who have rather questionable morals. In return for their help Castor must once again enter the service of Professor Mulbridge in spite of his excessive hate for her operation and methods. The book throws Castor into a array of horrific encounters with varied demons, nefarious henchmen and various other entities of both supernatural and extremely ordinary nature.

The book is a packed thriller with very little downtime at all for Castor to reflect on his actions and consequences as he rushes onwards to save his friend from the clutches on the demon Asmodeus while fighting to keep himself alive long enough to see that goal attained. The book doesn’t do much in the sense of explaining the numerous questions wondering around in ones head after reading the previous books in the series but it does a good job of providing minor information concerning the nature of demons and their development/evolution. The book is a excellent follow up to the prior books in the series and provides a closure to issues that have hounded Castor since the inception of the series. The Naming of The Beasts is a quick read and you won’t want to put it down as you go through it but of course I can only recommend it to fans of the Felix Castor series who have read up on the previous books and if you haven’t done that yet, go grab them today and start reading!

Related posts from the blog:

• Thicker Than Water
• The Devil You Know & Vicious Circle
• Dead Men’s Boots
• Digital Fortress
• Skullduggery Pleasant