PLOT & PACING
The premise? Fantastic. A mid-level demon working in Hell’s soul-acquisition department gets one last shot at redemption. Meanwhile, a deeply dysfunctional human family heads to their lake house for a summer of unraveling secrets. But what starts as a clever dual-narrative quickly feels like two separate books, awkwardly stapled together. One half—the family drama—is grounded, juicy, and emotionally resonant. The other half? A chaotic, jargon-filled hellscape of bureaucracy that sadly felt more like a chore than a thrill. At around the 300-page mark, I gave up and skimmed the rest.

CHARACTER & VOICE:
Peyote Trip (yes, that’s the demon’s name) had potential as a darkly comic antihero, but I never really clicked with him. His coworkers were more caricature than character, and I struggled to invest in their goals. On the flip side, the human characters—especially within the family drama—were flawed, messy, and interesting. I found myself wishing the entire book had just stayed with them.

STYLE & ATMOSPHERE:
Claudia Lux is clearly a strong writer with an eye for strange details and simmering tension. Her style is confident, but the tone shifts between the two storylines felt jarring. Where the human side was emotionally weighty and well-paced, the hell-side felt like a different novel entirely—with a tone that veered too often into “quirky” without enough cohesion.

THEMES & DEPTH:
The question at the novel’s core—what would you trade for a second chance?—is a good one. But I don’t think the book ever quite answered it in a satisfying way (or, maybe it did and I didn’t stick around long enough to find out). The revenge and redemption arcs felt underdeveloped. The emotional payoff was buried under a mountain of backstory, banter, and bureaucracy.

PERSONAL TAKE:
This was my first DNF in a while, and I was bummed. I wanted to like this book. The setup was killer. But the execution felt disjointed and dragged out. If it had stayed with the human storyline and leaned into the family dynamics, it might have landed better. I’ll be curious to see what the TV adaptation does with it (Phoebe Waller-Bridge is developing it over at Prime) but the novel just didn’t deliver.