I haven't had the best luck with Cassandra Khaw, but in this team-up with Richard Kadrey they've found a bonkers sweet spot that blends cosmic horror and urban fantasy that is a ton of fun. Summarizing the plot of this is a fools errand, but I expected the blended genre elements to feel disjointed and all over the place. Luckily, it all works pretty well. I am very curious to see where this series goes from here!

this book follows Julie who is a monster hunter who does odd jobs for big cooporations and is at an all time low in the beginning of the book. when her best friend and secret crush Sarah comes back to town it breaths new life into Julie and motivates her to be better. I loved this book it was wierd and quirky in the best ways and is very fast paced. It does have a lot of images of body horror so I would definitely check the TW’s first.Natalie Naudus narrates this audiobook as well and she did an acceptional job as always

This was an absolute blast, so much fun, and just what I needed. It felt like the best parts of Kadrey's previous series Sandman Slim, but with an extra level of lore and horror! I loved every second of it and can't wait for the sequel.

DNF about halfway through the story. Enjoyed the world-building and ideas but ultimately just couldn't hang on to finish it all the way through!

I'd like to thank the publisher for providing me with an ARC.

I was really hoping to love this book. The premise was great and the cover is fantastic. However I didn't find the characters or plot to be very engaging. The pacing also felt somewhat off.

This is fun horror/urban fantasy mashup, but it definitely requires all the trigger warnings for the grotesque and body horror. There are great side characters as well. I love Natalie Naudus as a narrator. Just everything about her performance, her tone, her character voices, her pace. She's one of the best.

The only negative is it takes tangents and wallows in them for a long while. It makes the story slow down and wonder what the point really is.

The Dead Take the Train was a very fun ride. Julie was easy to root for, even as she made extremely destructive discussions. Her relationships with her friends felt authentic, especially with Sarah. The violence and gore was just enough to be a bit camp without too much of an ick factor. This novel captured the energy of New York and the sinister nature of Wall Street really well. The evil in this book is exactly the kind of evil that is so pervasive in real life, just amplified by magic. My only qualm here is the magic itself. The system makes absolutely no sense, and I’m still mulling if this matters or not. Given this is a series, I hope that the it gets built out a bit more in subsequent books. Highly recommend this one on audio - Natalie Naudus is an incredible narrator bringing every person and monster to life.

Thank you netgalley and Macmillan Audio for the ARC - a fully engrossing audio experience.

This one fell short for me. I'm not sure what I was expecting, but it didn't keep my attention. I'm still a huge C. Khaw fan, and the narrator did a great job!

Thank you NetGalley for the advanced audiobook! All opinions are my own.

Action-packed and gore-filled dark urban fantasy for fans of Neil Gaiman or N.K. Jemisin. While I wouldn't consider this an all-out horror, there are certainly horror elements. This isn't a book for the squeamish. I loved the snarky narration and the audiobook was fantastic!

Thank you Netgalley for providing a digital ARC.

This was a pretty fast paced and surprising read. I found it very easy to connect with the story and really enjoyed how the author created some fun and unique situations. I also was drawn to this book for the cover and it's colors.

Sadly this one felt short of my hopes and expectations for it. If you loved Holly Black's The Book of Night and want the same kind of gritty paranormal/ urban fantasy story, albeit quippier, this may be the one for you, but it sadly did not work for me.

First tip: go into this blind. It’s way more fun that way.

The Dead Take The A Train had a fun cosmic horror vibe that was still rooted in reality, giving it a realistic feel. As realistic as a Wall Street Bro summoning a demon to get ahead in his career 🤣

This book was just pure fun. There’s banter, incredible humor, and a cast of flawed, interesting characters you get to ride with for basically 13 hours through a New York City rife with otherwordly creatures. To say I didn’t want to leave their side after I finished was an understatement. It’s one of those books where you’re introduced to so many cool ass creatures that the potential for future storylines is endless.

If you liked the vibes of Sister, Maiden, Monster (it’s cosmic elements and characters that make you say WTF in a good way) you’re probably really going to enjoy this one. Natalie Naudus does a phenomenal job at bringing each character and their differences to life.

I’m very excited to have just found out that this is a duology and now I cannot WAIT to join up with the gang again and see what being from hell (potentially literally) will show up next.

I enjoy this book by Richard Kadrey and Cassandra Khaw. This was a wild ride in this story. I know it is the first in the series. So I will be looking for the next book. I hope they keep the same narrator for the next book. She did an amazing job bring the book to life.

A little cool premise, but not sure if I loved this one. Loved the narrator, but found the story to be a little confusing and disjointed at times. Maybe the second book will be better?

This was a pretty fun read for about the first half, then for some reason i really fell out of the mood of the story. It was like Ghostbusters meets Blade, meets Clive Barker. I feel like Kadrey really excells on the 'urban horror' scene but after a while it got tired for me.

I think that the characters and the story were amazing. It was a little hard to follow at times, and I definitely think that it could have been shorter. There were a lot of scenes that I don't think ultimately contributed to the plot of the book.

However, I did find the climax to be really disappointing. I expected so much more, but it was all over so quickly with barely any actual resolution.

the Dead Take the A Train was a wonderful audiobook. I loved all of the strange various characters with gruesome horror as well as great queer representation.

(Reviewed for Library Journal) The best of Khaw and Kadrey combine to form a dark fantasy that doesn't mind swimming in the murky pool of cosmic weirdness.

I love this world, and the authors use great vocabulary, which obviously I love. The main character, Julie, is probably my favorite character ever, but the middle sags a bit. I thought about DNF'ing several times, but hung in there because Julie and Sarah. The narrator did a great job voicing all the characters.

If someone told me that the Miskatonic River had sent a tributary (or a tentacle) down from Innsmouth to Manhattan, I wouldn’t have been the least bit surprised. At all. The eldritch horrors of this book are VERY eldritch indeed, but it’s the human monsters that really make this story scream.

Besides, as a couple of the book’s characters remark, if the eldritch monster had actually BEEN Cthulhu it would have been much easier to deal with. Instead, Julie Crews and her ‘Scooby gang’ are stuck between the rock of The Mother Who Eats and the hard place of a fake archangel who thinks they have the chops to eat Mother. And certainly plans to scoop up Julie and her friends to pave the way.

But that’s not where we start. Where we start is most definitely at the human dimensions. Julie Crews is a down-at-heels, down-on-her-luck magic worker with plenty of brass, always willing to deliver a kick in the ass, with a knack for surviving stuff that no one should even know about, let alone throw down with.

So we begin with Julie, taking a job she knows she shouldn’t touch with someone else’s bargepole, from her lying, cheating, stealing ex-boyfriend. The one who trashed her and her reputation, stole credit for jobs that she did, and used that credit to slither his way onto and up the corporate ladder at the primo magical legal firm, Thorne & Dirk. (I always wanted it to be ‘Thorne & Dick’ and you probably will too.)

But the job pays real cash money, albeit not enough and under the table, and Julie needs that money to make her rent and pay for her many illicit, illegal and expensive habits – like cheap booze, epic amounts of drugs and high-quality magical equipment.

Her life has already gone more pear-shaped than the average person would expect to survive – and Julie doesn’t. Expect to survive, that is. People who do the kind of work she does and take the kind of damage she regularly takes don’t live to see 40. Or even 35. She’s the last and ONLY survivor of her class from magical training. And Julie’s 30th birthday is coming up fast.

What she doesn’t expect is for her best friend Sarah to show up at her door with one packed bag, a whole bunch of new verbal and physical twitches and dark shadows under her eyes that deserve their own zip code.

What neither Julie nor Sarah ever admit is that they are each other’s ‘one that got away’, or would be if either of them had ever womanned up and actually asked. They’re better together, always have been and always will be, whether they define that together as besties or roommates or the love of each other’s lives.

Something that they’ll have to test ALL the limits of, to hell and back (literally), when Julie’s ex and Sarah’s ex decide to fuck with them in entirely different ways at the exact same time. Putting Julie, Sarah, their friends and ALL of New York City into the crosshairs between the claws of a creature straight out of the Cthulhu Mythos and the many, many mouths of the Mother Who Eats.

Escape Rating B+: First and most importantly, this is your trigger warning that The Dead Take the A Train is a bloody, gory, gruesome reminder that urban fantasy as a genre is the uncanny child of mystery and horror, much like the uncanny babies being born in yesterday’s book, A Season of Monstrous Conceptions.

Meaning that, yes, while there’s a mystery at the heart of this story, there’s a monster or two – or ten – chewing that heart with their fangs as blood drips down their chin. Or chins, however many they just happen to have.

To the point where the horror elements go so far over the top that they come down in a splat of blood and viscera on the other side.

Second, for the first half of the story, both Sarah’s ex-husband Dan and Julie’s ex-boyfriend Tyler were so full of smug, self-congratulatory, evil, white dudebro entitlement that I just couldn’t hack listening to their perspectives. They both exhibited the kind of asshattery that is all over the news and if I wanted to listen to that there are entirely too many real places for it these days.

Which means that I switched from audio to text at that halfway point. I was finding the story compelling – if sometimes gross to the max – but every time the narrator retched out one of their perspectives I wanted to scream. I’ll confess that I gave up too soon, because just as I switched to text the dudebros started getting what they deserved and that was awesome.

While I fully admit that the above may be a ‘me’ thing and not a ‘you’ thing, the relentless drumbeat of just what terrible excuses for human beings Dan and Tyler were nearly threw me out of the story entirely, and that’s absolutely the reason this is a B+ and not any higher. Your reading mileage may vary.

Howsomever, the narrator, Natalie Naudus, is one that I absolutely love, and she does a terrific job of voicing stories that feature last-chance, hard-done-by, bad luck and worse trouble heroines, just like Julie Crews, who would be able to stand, scarred but never broken, right alongside similar characters that Naudus has voiced, like Opal Starling in Starling House, as well as Emiko Soong in Ebony Gate, Zelda in Last Exit, and Vivian Liao in Empress of Forever. (Also Charlie Hall in Holly Black’s Book of Night, but I read that one entirely in text.)

As much as the first half of The Dead Take the A Train drove me around the twist, when the story hits that second half it hits the ground running hard towards a slam bang finish. Along the way we have Julie’s slightly otherworldly ‘Scooby gang’ coming together, with teasing clues to American Gods-type backstories to come, the set up of an almost impossibly compelling magical version of NYC with hints of The City We Became with even more blood and guts and eldritch horrors, and, to cap it off in a blaze of glory, a fulfillment of one of Shakespeare’s most famous sayings (from Henry VI, Part 2 if you’re looking for a hint.)

The Dead Take the A Train is the first book in the projected Carrion City series by Cassandra Khaw and Richard Kadrey. There’s certainly plenty of carrion to pin a horde of stories on. If this first book is a taste of what’s to come, I can’t wait to see what I’ll be reading next – absolutely with the lights on!