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City Infernal

City Infernal

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Product Info Reviews

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Rating: 4 stars
Summary: Pretty good sequel
Review: I just got done with Infernal Angel and I think that is a pretty good sequel to City Infernal. It has lots of action and suspense to go along with a solid story. Cassie returns to contine her quest to find her sister Lissa. I have to admitt though that I was very dissapointed that Via and Hush wasnt in the sequel. They really helped make City Infernal a great novel. I also wished Lee would have completly explained what happened to Ezoriel. I thought he would be one of the central charaters in this book, but it never really brings him up. I was really dissapointed by that, but those things aside if you liked City Infernal you wont be dissapointed by Infernal Angel. It isnt quite and good as the first but it is very good in its on right.

There are alot of new charaters and its takes you to new parts of Mephistopolis. Lee is becomming one of my favorite writers.

I am just starting Monstrosity right now and if it is half as good as these two books were I know I will enjoy it.

Rating: 4 stars
Summary: Good fun...Peters out.
Review: This is my first experience with Lee, and all and all, I have to say that it was alot of fun...until the action packed finale.?

Rating: 2 stars
Summary: www,SFReader.com Review
Review: Review by Lynn Nicole Louis

Journeys to/escapes from/travels in Hell have provided a fertile field for many speculative fiction authors. Some easily recognized names in the biz (Like Niven and Anthony) have penned their Hellish tales, taking inspiration from Dante, the bible, other religious texts, or striking out entirely on their own.

In City Infernal, Edward Lee reconstructs Hell as a sprawling city, larger than any on earth, and filled with inhabitants trying to scrape by. Over the millennia, Hell has evolved into a bustling metropolis with looming skyscrapers, crowded streets, systemized evil, and atrocity as the status quo.

I've never read any of Lee's other work, but from the research I did I've learned that he has a reputation for being extreme. In fact, this book is regarded by many of his fans as 'light fare' and an effort on his part to enter the mainstream....

Complaints and suspension of disbelief aside, this was fun and even engaging (in a lurid sort of way). I could never quite shake the feeling that I was reading a graphic novel or comic book that had been rendered into prose form. It's fluff, and often disgusting fluff to boot, but if disgusting-fluff-trip-to-Hell stories are your bag, you won't want to miss it. If you're looking for any sort of complexity of character and plot, shades of evil, and interesting moral speculations, you'll going to come away disappointed.

Lynn Nicole Louis
Read the full review at www.SFReader.com

Rating: 4 stars
Summary: Return to the City Infernal
Review: Cassie, the Etheress, is back. Unfortunately she is in a mental institution. But that won't stop Satan and the forces of Hell from trying to get her in their control.

Two things may save Cassie. One is an angel working on her side. The other is the creation of an Etherean, the male version of what Cassie is.

Satan has some very large plans and he needs Cassie or the Etherean to pull them off. Cassie and her angel have other ideas.

This is the second book involving Cassie and the Mephistopolis (the city of Hell). This time around Cassie gets to see more of the hellish city (as do we). A very nice follow-up to City Infernal. I liked this book a little better than the first.

Be warned, much of the book takes place in Hell so things are not nice. Yes, many bad things happen to the characters and walk-ons in the book. This is Hell after all. For me, however, this version of Hell just doesn't work. Considering how quickly must lose their bodies, or parts thereof, it is astounding how many people have been walking around in perfect shape for centuries and millennia. Destruction falls indiscriminately on the residents.

Still, this is a good story where the author is not afraid to pull out all the stops when trying to show how hellish Hell can be.

Rating: 3 stars
Summary: Infernal Confusion
Review: Mr Lee has a great imagination and the book is a quick silly read. Like others have noted, the text is rife with misspellings and grammatical errors, even contradictory terms within the same paragraph ... So it should be obvious that not too much editorial supervision was devoted to what appears to be little more than a cash-in on the previous book, CITY INFERNAL.

Which is really the source of more ire than the book itself --- the apparent confusion on many readers' parts as to which book they are actually "reviewing." CITY INFERNAL is about the Goth kids, Zeke, Hush, etc, and Cassie and Lissa's adventures in the Mephistopolis; however, INFERNAL ANGEL is *not* about the Goth kids --- it is about Cassie's tutelage under the Angelese, and Walter's ascendance to the Etherean. The Goth kids are only mentioned in a catch-me-up chapter early on. Get your books straight, brethren.

INFERNAL ANGEL lacks any discernible plot as you read, but towards the end the reader is offerred a few explanations as to what has been going on. Cassie, the main character, lacks any depth or agency, and asks innumerable questions about her infernal surroundings, even though she spent an entire previous novel in the same location! Cassie's main function it seems is 1) to provide exposition and 2) be sexualized for the readership, a trait she shares with every single other female character, be they dead ones, demons, angels, etc. Lee never fails to describe how the female characters' breasts look('pert,' 'firm,' '38DD,' 'like flaps of leather') and finds opportunities for them all to be naked, engaged in sex, or horribly degraded and tortured. While naked.

It would be offensive if the entire affair were not rather pedestrian and sprinkled with the occasional moment of black humor or demonic invention. Confusing, borderline incoherent, but dumb gory fun all the same. At least it has a cool cover!

Rating: 5 stars
Summary: Excellent
Review: INFERNAL ANGEL is a wonderfully addicting read and a satisfying sequel to CITY INFERNAL. Don't listen to these people who are griping about it. This book kicks ass.

Rating: 3 stars
Summary: The disappointing sequel to City Infernal
Review: It was with great anticipation that I awaited this sequel's release. City Infernal, although not great prose, was a fantastic read with a highly inventive concept. Apparently Lee is planning to make this a trilogy. Let's just hope the third instalment ends up being better than this one.

Almost the entire first half of the novel takes place on earth. Cassie is now trapped in a psych ward. Her house was burned down along with her father in it and authorities believe that she's the one who committed this act of arson so that she could inherit her father's wealth. No one believes Cassie's story that it was Lucifer and his demons so that they could destroy the deadpass in her house that allows her to channel herself to hell's city, the Mephistopolis. While in the ward, Cassie receives visits from an angel by the name of Angelese who helps Cassie get back into hell so that she may use her etheress powers to overturn Lucifer's forces and also so Cassie can be reunited with her dead sister.

The above plot summary was a very abbreviated version of the initial events. Really, the action doesn't veer towards the Mephistopolis until at least halfway through the point of this 340 page novel. It's a VERY slow start in which several new characters are introduced, most notably Walter who is an Etherean, the male version of an Etheress. Admittedly, Lee draws this character extremely well. Walter is a hopeless geek with no social acumen whatsoever and Lee does a masterful job of making us feel his inner pain. It's too bad Lee was never as successful drawing out Cassie's character, who still to this point seems as empty psychologically and personality wise as a hollow shell. It's almost as though Cassie is presented in a distant 3rd person narrative and we as readers are unable to feel anything for her.

Once the novel finally starts taking place in the Mephistopolis, again it takes forever for anything to happen. The pace and the action does pick up after a while but it seems a little too late. Similar to City Infernal, descriptions of the Mephistopolis and its sights abound. The problem is, we've already been described in extensive detail in the first novel the atrocities of the Mephistopolis so why go into mind-numbing detail again? It's not that the same things are described, there are new sites described but it all seems rather arbitrary. It feels as though Lee is just making all these things up on the spot. The gore level is quite low in this novel which will surely disappoint regular readers of Lee's novels. I understand that in no way is this series meant to be as graphic as the author's other works but there's less gore in this novel than even City Infernal.

It saddens me to give this a mediocre star rating since I'm a big fan of Lee's work. Infernal Angel is not a total washout, it is quite entertaining, it just didn't move me the way the first novel did. In a way, this entire novel feels like a setup for much more grandiose things to happen in the series' 3rd entry. Infernal Angel does finish with a bang so I'll still be eagerly awaiting the final novel of this trilogy.

Rating: 4 stars
Summary: Great sequel
Review: I enjoyed reading this sequel. Yes it did have some grammer mistakes but finding out what happens to Cassie was well worth it.
The action and adventure in the novel was great. Also an other reviewer commented that Lee repeats a small part of City Infernal into this book but thats just to remind the reader about something. Its like experiencing hell all over again. Get this sequel if you have read City Infernal.

Rating: 2 stars
Summary: Aggravating
Review: I really wanted to like this book more than I did. The prelude to 'Infernal Angel', 'City Infernal', was a fast-paced guilty pleasure of a book. Not something you'd read to provoke deep thought, but entertaining in a b-grade horror movie kind of way. The "Infernal" books are my only experiences with Ed Lee so far, and I like enough of what he gave me here to give him another try--mostly because I got the distinct feeling he was holding back. If you pick these books up with a minimum of expectation, I think you'll get your money's worth. But there are some problems...
This second outing in the Mephistopolis feels forced. At one point early on, the book is actually padded with a full chapter taken directly from the previous book, which to me is a big red flag--very little actually seemed to happen in this book. The characters are cartoonish, and while that's well and good for mindless entertainment, Cassie, the goth-girl protagonist who's been to Hell on a semi-regular basis by the onset of 'Angel's action, seems to have the retention-level of a particularly stupid goldfish; after a combined 700 pages or so with her, I've seen no dynamic qualities. A related gripe: the dialog is repetitious and does nothing to develop characters. Detail is usually nonexistent in Lee's descriptions, but then sometimes he dresses something up a bit and it doesn't quite make sense (example: at one point a character walks over cobble-stones made from "ground skulls"--question: if it's ground, how the hell would we know skull from any other bone?). The preceeding novel feels like someone having fun, and telling a story. This volume made me feel like Lee didn't know where the story was going, and then a flat-feeling ending just pops up in the last few pages--I think this one got churned out to pay the rent, and with Lee uninvested in the proceedings, I couldn't help but follow his lead.

Rating: 4 stars
Summary: Not for the faint of heart or weak of stomach!
Review: I wasn't quite sure what to expect when I picked up a copy of Edward Lee's "City Infernal". I had never read anything by the gentleman and knew little of him. From other reviews, I surmised that he was of the same ilk as Richard Laymon, Simon Clark, Tom Piccarilli and others, but little did I know that his "over-the-top" brand of horror would put them to shame. Lee goes full throttle in this story which, in a way, is his version of "Dante's Inferno".

The story revolves around Cassie Heydon, a gothic teenager who is filled with guilt over the suicide of her twin sister, Lissa - a suicide that Cassie feels she drove her sister to over a misunderstanding involving Cassie and Lissa's boyfriend. When Cassie's father decides that the best thing to her clear his daughter's mind and conscience is to move them from the city to the country, they unknowingly take up residence in the town's haunted house. As Cassie explores her new digs she encounters a trio of ghostly characters that only she can see. The trio, Xeke, Via, & Hush, are actually living souls who, because of their misdeeds on earth, have been sent to Hell for eternity. Only Cassie can see them because the trio tells her that she is an Etheress - an ultra-powerful being who is capable of performing great feats of telekinesis and other mental powers if she were to visit Hell. Visit Hell? "Hell yes" she's told, that is, if she ever wants to reconcile with her sister. Cassie decides to follow the trio into Hell and attempt to make contact with her dead twin.

From this point, Lee takes the reader on a tour of Hell that can't be adequately be described by this reviewer and instead should only be experienced by the reader. Let's just say that that the reader should refrain from eating lunch or dinner while reading this novel. Lee's imagination is boundless as he describes in graphic detail what Hell must look like. Portrayed as a gigantic city under the rule of Satan, it lives and breaths like any other city except that it's occupants are damned to live there for eternity.

Short on character development, don't expect a deep plot in "City Infernal". What the reader will get instead is a jolting, page-turning story that has a number of twists and turns along the way. Any of the fans of the aforementioned authors should enjoy this wild ride and won't go away dissatisfied with the novel. Oh, and yes, at the end of the book the table is definitely set for a sequel. As of this review that sequel, "Infernal Angel" will be available to readers in April, 2004.


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