Helen Brandt would do anything for those she loves. She literally gave her soul and lost the life she knew to save her brother. Now her time is up. Ten years for a life doesn't seem like too bad a deal until those ten years are up. She never knew she'd forge a new life in Chicago as a private detective and part-time diviner. She never knew Edith would walk into her life and make every second precious. And as Helen sets about doing a job for Marlowe at twice her usual fee she can't help but think she'd rather be home with Edith. Though Marlowe is the perfect client, always knows what she wants, always knows how to intrigue Helen, always pays on time though heaven knows where her money comes from, as she is always living in the lap of luxury at the Palmer House hotel. And she has one hell of a job for Helen. The photos and augury in the alleyway keeping her away from Edith was just to wet Helen's appetite. The girl murdered there, Kelly McIntyre, is just the latest victim of the murderer dubbed the White City Vampire and Marlowe wants that killer brought to her. But Helen's time left on Earth is short so she turns down the job. Which is when Marlowe throws a wrench in Helen's carefully orchestrated death; what if she could get Helen her soul back? All Helen has to do is uncover the killer and she can live out her long life with Edith. The deal seems too good to be true. Which it probably is. But it's not like Helen has anything left to lose except a lifetime with Edith. But Marlowe did warn her it would be dangerous, and soon the divine and the damned are after her as she becomes the target of the White City Vampire. How could they know she's on the case? What's more the Brotherhood who excommunicated her for bringing back her brother are on the case too. If only she had an ace up her sleeve... But sadly she doesn't, but Edith might...

If I had to choose between noir and fantasy, I'll be honest, I'd most likely choose fantasy. And yet noir and fantasy merge together beautifully. I often try to think about what makes certain genres mesh together well, certain time periods just beg to have that little something more. They're usually times of great change and upheaval when you can see the cracks in the world and out of those cracks comes something magical, something different. The forties are one such time. World War II changed everything and it makes sense that along with the evil that was stirred up, so were other forces both demonic and angelic. And with the heavenly hosts I couldn't help think about how much I love the television show Lucifer. While the main framing device is the devil does a procedural, the show did so much more, especially during the noir episode "It Never Ends Well for the Chicken." This episode showed these two genres perfectly blending together and I never thought I would see that again, and then I picked up Even Though I Knew the End. I adore this world that C.L. Polk has created. There's this wonderful merging of noir and a unique magical system that is somehow, at it's bones, just so Chicago. As someone who has spent a fair amount of my life visiting Chicago they perfectly captured that sense of place. I was in a place I loved but in an era that my grandparents would have known. And don't get me started on the crime scene photography with magic aspect, that was a bullseye. This is so unique and original but at the same time it was reminiscent of things I'd forgotten I'd loved, from Who Framed Roger Rabbit to The Exorcist to H.H. Holmes, immortalized in Erik Larson's The Devil in the White City. And while this book is wonderful and perfect and complete, I want more stories set in this world! A world that is made all the more perfect by Helen and Edith's love. Helen really would do anything for those she loves and that just about breaks my heart.

I pick up Tor.com's novellas pretty much automatically these days, because 9.9 times out of 10, I'm in for a good (or at least an interesting) time. Even Though I Knew The End is no exception, featuring a sapphic love story, demons, deals at the crossroads, and a little detective fiction. I say a little, because although the character is a detective, that's mostly just the framework that the rest hangs on. We don't see a lot of serious detecting.

For those who loved Supernatural when it was on air (with all its flaws), and resonated with the sacrifices Dean made for Sam, this one's definitely up your street. Our protagonist sold her soul for her brother's life long ago, and her time's almost up. In her last days, she investigates a bloody killing, tracking down the people who were possessed in order to do the murder, and discovering some secrets about her own partner into the bargain.

Because it's a novella, everything has to get sketched in quickly, from the worldbuilding to the characters' backstories to the love between Helen and Edith, and it works really well. I can be picky about how well novellas handle their scope, but Polk gets it right here.

My only problem is that the ending definitely left me sad. I'd been thinking at first that I might get a copy for my sister, but I try my best not to give her any tragic lesbians -- the world has done enough of that already. So do be aware that this ends with a certain degree of queer tragedy; I won't say more than that, for spoilers' sake.

There's so much to enjoy in this novella about a soulless detective trying to solve a series of murders in her city.

I loved the writing. The tone and general feel of the story is stylized, drawing the reader into this alternate world where demons and angels inhabit peoples' bodies. The pace was spot on, the action and deeper dive into the world and its mysteries well played between fast action sequences. I also liked that it was short coming in at 136 pages. It was the perfect length, compact and able to capture all of the intricacies of the world and people.

That said, there was a lot of crazy stuff happening which I liked, but thought maybe the characters believed it too easily. Like something crazy is happening, and the main character just accepts this and doesn't question it. Which I guess is why I love the novella, there's not a lot of back and forth with belief. I would have at least liked one conversation in particular to be like - "Wait, what? How is that possible? I don't believe it!" Such a minor thing, pet peeve really. Otherwise, it was fantastic.

Go pick up your copy. The cover art is striking and sets the perfect tone for this story packed with love and danger and rich fantasy world.

I love.

Enough said.

CL Polk is easily one of my most favoritist authors, and I cannot believe that I did not read this book when I had the ARC. Or immediately after buying the book. It's so good, and while many novellas try to cram too much into a brief timespan, Polk makes every single sentence count with such deliciously breathtaking craft.

Anywho. 1941 Chicago. Lesbians. Murder. Magic. Secret societies. And dangerous bargains. What's not to love?

I absolutely ADORED this novella. Would love a full length novel or at least several more novella's following similar characters, story lines, and this setting!

The ending broke me, but the story was worth every tear. I want more and some loose ends tied up, but this was fantastic.

In this alternate history novella, a warlock expelled from her order for trading in her soul tries to uncover who is behind a disturbing string of murders. But in a world where angels and demons are all too real, the risks for a woman who's already made a deal with the devil are incalculably high.

A super effective novella in that the story itself felt rather complete and it had enough space to let me invest in the main characters. It's always hard putting together a whole investigation in a limited amount of time and for me here, it did end up feeling a bit overstuffed, plot-wise, but it made it readable and thrilling. The setting and atmosphere were great, the end was bittersweet, and I gobbled this right up.

I would recommend this for fans of A Master of Djinn by P. Djeli Clark.

I was a little bit surprised by how much I liked this book! Alternate historical setting, paranormal elements, a romantic interest, and a who-dun-it-- it sounds like it would be too busy, but it all comes together surprisingly well.

The book is set in a paranormal alternate historical Chicago. The strong sense of place and the dark tone had me thinking a lot of [book:Storm Front|47212] & the Dresden Files series, but this has better story and characters. The paranormal elements are loosely sketched, so will be best for readers who already read in the genre. Don't suggest-- or suggest with caveats-- to readers who demand immersive universe-building with every rule, spell, ability, and so on detailed and explained.

The mystery plot, although it's what starts the story and is the ostensible reason for the adventures, plays second fiddle to the main character's relationships. Suggest to readers of The Cybernetic Tea Shop and A Psalm for the Wild-Built!

eARC from NetGalley.

Thank you to the publisher for a review copy!

The amount of world building that was developed in this short novel was incredible. I didn't expect the depth or believability that the author created, but it's there. I also really enjoyed the vulnerable and intense themes that the author explored - queer love in a time and place that found it immoral and illegal; misogyny and the imbalanced power dynamics from which women suffer; the institutionalization of women in asylums and their horrific suffering of conversion therapies.

Where this book fell short for me was the ending. To be blunt, I don't like it. Both the plot choices that the author made as well as the technicalities of how it was written. The culmination of the noir-like murder mystery was cleanly wrapped up yet the plot twist was predictable. And while Helen and Edith's relationship gave me all the feels, I was disappointed by the lack of resolution for Helen's fractured relationship with her brother.

However, please don't let these criticisms hold you back from being able to enjoy the beautiful love of this sapphic couple. They were sweet enough to make my molars ache, and I recommend this book to anyone needing a quick read to break a reading slump.

Even Though I Knew the End is a quick, complex fantasy/ mystery with a side of romance. It follows a magical private eye, Elena, as she works on her last gig before she knows she will die. She made a deal with a demon ten years before, and she wants to spend her remaining days with her girlfriend, Edith. However, this case is much bigger than first meets the eye. It involves, angels, demons, an estranged brother, a mental institution, and the risk of many human souls.

While this is a well-written and interesting premise, the genre is just not for me. I can imagine that some fantasy fans will love the quick world-building and satisfying conclusion.

I wish this had been a novel so that certain things could have been fleshed out better. The ending is what will stay with me for a while. Uff...

ven Though I Knew the End by C.L.Polk is a stunning supernatural noir. The story immediately jumps into the action, engaging you with the characters, including the love story between Helen and her love Edith. It shows its emotional cards quickly and doesn’t pull any punches, hooking you with its heart and its characters. 

It is fast paced and the detective noir elements are well developed, including the magical aspects. I loved the worldbuilding, the mystery that the story explores and truly loved the ending. The magic is the key and that piece is well designed, allowing the reader to follow along and make their own guesses as to what’s going on in the story. The ending is surprising but also completely fitting. 

What puzzled me was that the terminology, especially in the beginning, was not well explained. Once the novel took off, more was explained but it left me confused at the start. Also the pacing is so quick and a bit off to fully explore the various relationships and characters. I felt Ted ending up not getting enough development in particular and I would have liked either a longer novel or I want a sequel. I still enjoyed the story and the relationship. The story has a stunning supernatural noir element but I wished I’d gotten just more depth from all the characters.

This is a quick but VERY satisfying read. Vibes, style, and substance- I would happily revisit this world with Polk over and over- this book introduces so many compelling characters that I would love to spend more time with.

Sapphic romance, noir, angels, politics, and a magical alternate Chicago caught between Heaven and Hell.

Yessssss.

Thanks so much to Tordotcom for the review copy, this was a hit for me- and also special callout for the cover design, I think it's pretty special.

I really enjoyed Even Though I Knew the End! This novella really packs a punch in only a few pages, with a whole mythology of angels and demons, love and loss and family. I also appreciated the clear research that went into the experiences of queer people in the 1930s.

Overall, the only things I missed in this book were due to its short length—I think this could easily have been a longer novel, and I would not object at all if C.L. Polk decided to return to this world.

Thank you to Tordotcom and NetGalley for a review copy of this book. All opinions are my own.

When Helen Brandt agrees to perform an augury spell on a murder scene, she expects that to be the end of it: cast her spell, photograph the horrifying blood magic left behind by the so-called White City Vampire, and head home to her girlfriend, Edith. Instead, like any good noir detective, she’s pulled in by the job. Her sometime-employer Marlowe offers her a bargain she can’t turn down: a thousand dollars plus the life she’s always wanted—that is, world enough and time with Edith—in exchange for tracking down the serial killer who’s been committing gruesome murders all over Chicago.

Oh, and I forgot to say: Helen only has three days to live.

If you are now or have ever been a fan of the fifteen (yes) seasons–long CW television program Supernatural (2005-2020), then it’s likely that you have inadvertently given yourself the same stupid superpower I now possess: a nose for when a book was written by a person with strong opinions about Dean Winchester and his angel boyfriend Castiel. C. L. Polk hasn’t buried their roots too deeply in Even Though I Knew the End, which features ritual circles, spells in the Enochian tongue, and demon bargains (inter alia). It might be set in 1940s Chicago rather than present-day Vancouver middle America, but it’s the smart, queer, feminist, heartfelt angels-and-demons story Supernatural fans craved all along.

I hope my reference to the stupidest show on earth will not be taken as any kind of jab at Even Though I Knew the End. C. L. Polk’s writing has gotten smarter, tighter, and more intentional with every book they’ve written, and this latest novella sees them at such a peak of performance that I instantly became covetous of whatever their next book is going to be. Helen is in some respects a classic noir protagonist—lured into a job she knows better than to take, arraying herself against injustice in the establishment—and yet Polk avoids the tired misogyny of the genre.

Likewise, Helen’s relationship with the angelic Edith doesn’t founder on the rocks of her job and its dangers: on the contrary, Edith’s talent at developing photography and her compassion for the White City Vampire’s victims encourage Helen to go deeper into the case. With Helen as the jaded noir detective, the character of Edith could easily have been typecast into one of the few noir molds for love interests. Polk charts a middle course between the Scylla of too-good-for-this-world martyr to Helen’s work and the Charybdis of femme fatale with dubious loyalties. Where Helen is scrappy and sharp-tongued, Edith is quietly steadfast, often glimpsed at the ledge of a windowsill feeding the sparrows. But soft is not the same as weak, and Edith’s gentleness overlays a core of steely strength.

Magic is ambient in Helen’s life partly because that’s her training. Until ten years minus three days ago, she was a promising initiate in a respected magical order, the Brotherhood of the Compass. Now that she’s been cast out of the order, she’s considered a “warlock” and is at risk of unspecified but probably very nasty discipline if she treads too close to the Brotherhood’s work. Beyond that, there’s magic in the world around her: there are people with low-level telepathy—Edith often picks up on the thoughts of people around her, “as if someone turned a radio dial to a new station”; others with a particular knack for being possessed by supernatural beings without losing themselves. The novella’s length doesn’t offer a ton of space to explore the broader implications of how, for instance, the presence of magic in the world has affected the course of World War II, but you do get the sense that there’s more to explore, should the author ever have the inclination to steer us to other corners of this world.

The vibes in this book are impeccable. Polk includes enough period detail to make her world feel real, historical, and populated with actual humans. An early description of Edith has her in a “soft green skirt suit with the corner of a lace veil peeking out of a pocket,” an outfit I can picture perfectly and which also hints at Edith’s devout Catholic faith (this will become relevant later because, you know, demons). Worldbuilding details slide into the story as smooth as butter, linked to plot points and emotional beats. We learn that Helen’s a disreputable sort of magic user almost incidentally, when she runs into her long-lost brother Ted, who still belongs to the Brotherhood of the Compass that so disdains Helen’s work. A spoonful of sibling feelings really does help the exposition go down—in the most delightful (read: painful) way!

The most distressing piece of worldbuilding takes place about two-thirds of the way through the novella (chapter 3 of act IV, in case anyone needs to brace themselves), when Helen’s attempt to solve the murders takes her to the state asylum. We see several women whose minds have been damaged through supernatural means, and Helen catches a glimpse of a woman she knows from the gay bar she frequents with Edith. “Who put her here, claiming to love her?” she muses, guessing that her friend has been subject to shock therapy intended to “cure” her of queerness. The moment feels like its own electric shock. Polk is carefully minimalist and respectful in their depiction of the asylum, but they do not shy away from reminding readers that, even as Helen and Edith face down magical dangers that have only ever existed in fiction, they are also subject to the all-too-real risks of state oppression and medical violence.

In this way, the novella puts homophobia firmly in its place. As the plot thickens in the case, Helen learns that Edith plays host to an angel called Haraniel, who is now taking an interest in the White City Vampire. Haraniel is one of a host of angels expelled from heaven for getting too cozy with humans, now trying to earn their way back home by living out the span of a human life and—they hope—returning to heaven when their human host finally dies. The two of them, Helen and Haraniel-in-Edith’s-body, team up to further their investigations, despite Helen’s considerable discomfort with the knowledge that Haraniel has been a background observer to their entire relationship. And yes, this includes the boning. But Haraniel has no time for the human cruelty Helen witnesses in the asylum: “The revulsion for homosexual love is a human opinion,” they remark scornfully.

Murder mysteries are tricky to pull off, requiring the author to perform a balancing act between releasing the right information at the right spot (so the twists, turns, and eventual resolution don’t feel like a cheat) and avoiding the risk of overplaying their hand (lest the explanation feel telegraphed). Even Though I Knew the End is flawlessly paced, doling out reveals that startle and dazzle the reader into missing the clues tucked into those moments. Polk is prone to a style of plot twist I particularly enjoy, where the reader or the protagonist or both suddenly understand that the crucial piece of information has been known all along, just not by them. Once you know it, you realize it’s been thrumming along as subtext this entire time, if you had only known what you were looking for. Of course Helen bargained away her soul to save the life of her brother; of course Edith offered herself in service of the higher powers she believes in so ardently.

In this way, the novella offers a straightforwardly terrific yarn that sucked me in from chapter one and didn’t let me go. Like all of Polk’s work to date, however, Even Though we Knew the End also explores questions of justice, queerness, and the arduous work of making moral choices within immoral structures. Polk makes beautiful use of the novella length, maintaining a tight focus on Helen’s two most central relationships (Edith and Ted) without sacrificing the sense that a vast, rich world exists around them. This is a bravura performance from an author who just keeps getting better.

Let me start by saying, go into this one with zero expectations or assumptions that you know what is happening – this will give you the best possible experience of this short but sweet beauty of a novel (novella?). At 136 pages, ETIKtE is a rollercoaster ride of feels that most will quickly whip through with ease.

Our MC is deeply in love with her partner and after making a deal to save her family, she knows her love affair is about to run its course. Rejected and exiled from the local agency in charge of supernatural matters, Helen is on her own and runs errands for her demonic boss to make a living. When she is offered one final job in exchange for the return of her soul, she jumps at the opportunity, problem is the job is to find a serial killer who no one has ever survived.

So, Helen is your classic rough as guts, prickly cactus with a heart of gold – she is a giant marshmallow when it comes to her conduit girlfriend, Edith, and honestly its sapphic squish at its finest. Having sold her soul to a demon to save her entire family’s lives in an accident that should have ended them all, she just wants her happily ever after. Knowing her time is running out, she’s making promises she cant possibly keep but I feel like this makes it SO MUCH BETTER. Edith on the other is a firm believer in heaven, hell and the great beyond. She’s also an angel magnet whose body is occasionally taken over by a fallen angel – think Castiel taking over that guy but they are both conscious at the same time. Perfect couple right.

Basically the whole thing goes that the big bad is killing people and in true detective noir style, Helen is out to do one final job in order to win back her contract. Problem is, the White City Vampire is killing people in the days before their deals expire and therefore demons are getting mad. I will admit to slight confusion as to how this could possible occur and thinking back on how it actually went, the answer was obvious. But damn straight I internally gasped at the reveal.

As you may have noticed from reading this, I’ve kept details vague. Yes, it’s on purpose. As I said earlier, if you go into this with expectations surrounding plot or storyline, you may just accidentally not appreciate it for what it is. And that’s a novella that reads as a combination of the best of sapphic romance, that weird season of Supernatural where everyone was possessed by literally any vaguely angelic being you can find right before the rapture and one of those old-timey detective movies where everyone is on the verge of retirement but ends up dying on the job. What I’m saying is this – its weird and fantastic and honestly just through yourself at it because it’s an afternoon of reading well spent.

Fantasy romances are on the upswing, with plenty of L.G.B.T.Q. love stories to boot. C.L. Polk’s second-world romance “Witchmark” brought home a World Fantasy Award in 2019, and this year they’ve graced us with EVEN THOUGH I KNEW THE END (Tordotcom, 144 pp. $19.99), a queer women’s magical noir where every femme’s fatale. Helen Brandt, a private detective with only days left to live, is on the trail of a supernatural killer, and desperate to protect her beloved Edith from both those facts. Eerie, sharp and fiercely bittersweet.

Bittersweet and full of complex emotion, Polk's newest book balances the fantastical with the banality of evil. Telling the story of two women wrapped in their own secrets and solitude, this book gives us a love story where everything is against them, and yet you can't help rooting for their happiness.

Even Though I Knew the End by C.L. Polk was one of my most anticipated reads and I'm so glad that I managed to get approved for this. I'm so glad I decided to finally start in on this author this year because this was great. Historical fantasy is one of my favorite genres and Polk does it so well, now I just need to catch up on the rest of this author's books.