Author: John Levitt
Cover Artist: Don Sipley
Publisher: ACE
Binding: Paperback
Publication Date: October 2007
Dog Days by John Levitt was a great little cross-genre read; I highly enjoyed this urban mystery/fantasy set in San Francisco. My favorite thing: Mason, the hero, has a dog for a familiar. But Louie isn’t really a dog, and he’s not really a familiar. In a mix of East and West, Louie and others like him are called Ifrits for lack of a better term. Louie can sense danger, especially magical danger, and he’s not quite of this world, which makes him a very interesting character. Whatever else he is, he is Mason’s best friend. There is a powerful tie between the two.
Mason is a “practitioner,” which means he has the ability to do magic. He’s a bit on the lazy side and would rather not mess with it too much. It’s work, and he has old friends that want him to spend time being an “enforcer;” keeping other practitioners in line so that the world doesn’t really figure out that there are a bunch of magic users running around. Mason tried the enforcement bit and decided being a musician with no money was a better fit. He likes to improvise, and he isn’t fond of taking orders so being a jazz musician is his chosen profession. I liked the tie-in to music; it made understanding Mason’s magic very easy. It really played well with “improvisation” since he never studied magic enough to have spells at the ready.
It’s really too bad that Mason didn’t practice his magic more because even though he doesn’t want to be an enforcer, someone appears to be threatened by him–or maybe they are just trying to kill him because they don’t like him. Either way, Mason needs his old friends to help him out, which of course they are willing to do. And while they are helping him, they’d really like it if Mason could help them with a problem too.
The character development in the story is quite strong, although I thought the women in the story could have been stronger. The author redeemed himself on this account in the second half when he introduced a Wicca who played a key role in more than one rescue. The pacing picked up throughout the book. There are great action scenes, a couple of unique battles and some very creative spells used to get out of danger. Levitt doesn’t limit himself to western lore when it comes to monsters either.
There were a couple of areas where I thought opportunities were missed. One key area that left me a bit flummoxed was Mason’s general disbelief in other magical systems—such as occult (black magic) and Wicca. That line of logic didn’t make sense to me, especially since Mason was following the general belief about black magic as taught to him by his mentors—people who were supposed to be far more knowledgeable about magic than he. It did make for a rather interesting scene or two, but I found it hard to believe that people that studied magic their entire lives were so unwilling to really believe in black magic. His mentors did believe in Wicca, and it didn’t take long to convince Mason.
I could probably whine about a couple of other minor details, but not without giving away too much of the plot so I’ll just say there were a couple of loose ends that could have been tied up better. Nothing major, just nitpicks.
The Ifrits (Louie the dog) were some of the most interesting characters in the book and played a major role. Levitt did a great job of doling out information about them—keeping me curious and also making them very easy to care about. I still have questions about them and their nature, but this is not a bad thing as it leaves room for the series to continue.
All in all, I highly recommend this book to anyone that likes urban fantasy. What seemed like a simple plot at first came together exceptionally well and had more than enough surprises to keep it interesting.
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