Jayce is a homeless man with a beast inside of him, quite literally. A monster he calls wolf, who keeps him solitary from other people and barely making it day to day. Elsewhere, in a nursing home, a man named Max is looking for Jayce. Or for a way out of his prison, which he thinks he will manage if the son he has never met finds him something he wants.

Brian Cave’s Old School Evil takes a while to get going, but after it gets there it is a wildly fun ride. It exists as a love story to 80s cartoons and it succeeds in that regard. The old supervillains are old, bodies wasting away as they managed to live so long. And their children have suffered, if not directly, than indirectly from the crimes of their fathers’ pasts. It is both realistic and not at the same time.

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Tavia and Effie are not-blood-sister-sisters. Tavia is a siren, who must keep the fact she is a siren under wraps. Effie is not a siren, but is plagued by events which happened when she was nine, the loss of her mother, and currently lives with Tavia as they go to high school together. While Tavia is trying to figure out how to permanently silence her voice so as to stop fearing what will happen if people find out about her, Effie is struggling with not knowing who she is and her fear that the events of her past will happen again. Together they fight for themselves and each other.

I really loved this story. Certainly a lot of the magical influences were straight up one-to-ones for racism and sexism, but as all of this is still ever present, it’s certainly a subject that needs pushing in our literature.

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