Angel of Darkness, by Charles de Lint

I just love Charles de Lint's books. His fantasies are great, and even his few horror novels are pretty damn good. So far, Angel of Darkness is my favorite of the horror novels.

This book has a pretty scary sort of monster. It's way better than the monsters/villain of the other de Lint horror novels. As you can guess from the title, the monster is a sort of avenging angel. The problem is, that after a lunatic opens a portal to the angel's world, it starts doing its vengeance thing on innocent people.

The creature was powerful enough that I was wondering how it was going to be stopped the whole way through the book. This book doesn't have any of the urban wizards or people with useful bits of folklore that always seem to show up and help save the day in other de Lint books. That's a good thing that makes this book more interesting.

Other than that, there are a lot of standard de Lint character types. There's a victim of abuse. There's an abuser. There's a musician. There are good and bad cops. There's a guy who tries to help street kids. As is usual in de Lint's books, they don't come across as stereotypes, even though he uses them a lot.

I give Angel of Darkness the full five yo-yos.