Over a God’s Dead Body by Joel Spriggs
My rating: 5 of 5 stars

Over a God’s Dead Body is the best urban fantasy story I’ve read this year. There’s a cracking flow to the narrative and some superb imagery. As well as being a grittily realistic there are also laugh out loud moments. It’s a hard mix to pull off, but Joel Spriggs manages it really well in Over a God’s Dead Body.

Over a God’s Dead Body

The story has an American Gods feel to it, mixed with the human observation that Terry Pratchett has in his discworld series. The basis of the story is that Loki has been enslaved by an Egyptian god and is obliged to steal the dead body of another god. Being Loki he isn’t being entirely straight, and is doing his best to wriggle out of the obligation. The other main characters are twins that are Loki’s descendants and a voodoo priestess. So we have a collection of different pantheons in play, Norse, Egyptian, Haitian and also some other supernatural creatures (there’s a bigfoot and a vampire to name two).

I really enjoyed reading Over a God’s Dead Body and there were all sorts of threads that Joel Spriggs managed to weave neatly together into the denouement. We had a thread with a talented young man with an unfortunately painted mural on his van of a wizard and a unicorn. There’s a girl scout cookie selling thread, which turns out to be the voodoo priestesses kids and her friends, Seth (the Egyptian god Loki is obliged to) and some of the faculty at Baldur college, we also follow Esmy and her brother who are descendants of one of Loki’s amorous encounters on earth.

It all comes together with a plan to steal the body and a distraction that involves a shape-shifting purple dinosaur and the “rusty metal suppository of doom made the shocked dinosaur roar in sudden pain”.

Go read it, you’ll enjoy it!

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