Welcome to Harker Academy for Deviant Defense. Keep your daggers sharp, and your wits even sharper.

Viv Abbot is an average twenty-one-year-old girl. She lives in an expensive city where the rent is too high, works long hours at a thankless job, and is dating a guy she doesn’t even like in the hopes of winning her prickly mother’s approval.

She just also happens to be a demon hunter.

Ever since her father’s murder, she’s been forced to hunt deviants alone, meaning everyone, including her family, sees her as an outsider. . . . Until the day she crosses paths with a dangerously alluring demon, Reid Graveheart. The reformed deviant tells her of a school for people just like her: Harker Academy for Deviant Defense. If she enrolls, she’ll learn to hone her craft, work with other hunters, and never be alone again.

But Viv has a deadly secret. One that not even her new friends at Harker can know about. Not when the school might hold the answers to untangling the mystery surrounding Viv’s father’s death. When strange occurrences begin to plague the students, Viv will have to figure out who she can trust, and fast. All while trying to ace her classes, not fall for a demon, and make it through her first year at Harker in one piece. How hard could that be?

What if Buffy the Vampire Slayer had to go away for residential training?

What if Hogwarts was a University rather than a secondary school?

What if Snape was young and hot and Harry was an adult woman?

What if Bella Swan fell for a reformed soul-sucker rather than a vegetarian blood-sucker?

These are the kind of questions Golden explores in this high-octane urban romp.

The action begins in the city environment of Astera – which feels like a combination of Manhattan and Brooklyn with the dividing line of the East River reimagined as a chasm created by demonic forces. This does make Astera something of a special city and – although the portal to hell has been closed – a veritable menagerie of different hellish creatures stalk its streets. The vampires, werewolves, demons and a variety of other lesser creatures comprise the kingdom(?) of Deviants and our protagonist Viv Abbot is a somewhat self-trained and experienced culler of these creatures.

We and Viv are swiftly introduced to the parallel setting of the Harker Academy accessed through a subtle portal in an Astera museum – The Windsor. The academy takes in young men and women who – at the age of 21 – have found they have come into demon hunting powers, often inherited from hunter parents. At Harker they are trained over the course of four years to hone and refine that raw talent and become effective Hunters. We learn early on that Viv is different because she manifested the power to hunt demons as a child. This makes her, like her father, a special class of hunter – an aeon. Aeons are more powerful – Viv can detect the presence of demons with her skin in the same way that Bilbo’s sword Sting would glow in the presence of goblins – but also more dangerous to both the angelic and demonic sides of the eternal battle.

The story is full of visceral action from the off as we find Viv protecting the physical bodies and immortal souls of an unsuspecting young mother and her children from a demon on the subway. The fact that demonic or deviant bodies crumble to ash quite quickly does avoid embarrassing discussions with local law enforcement. Viv does make an impetuous protagonist, almost rash at times, and that impulsivity ensures she gets into a fair few scrapes that keep the blood flowing – inside and out of bodies.

Golden gives us a large cast of characters from the found family of fellow deviant hunters that Viv discovers at Harker to the more fractious family of Viv’s surviving relatives, mother, sister and the sister-in-law who also happens to be her employer at the museum. As young men and women the Harker students are naturally inclined towards having a good time out on the town – and this is epitomized by Sophia, summarized by the smoulderingly handsome demonic tutor Reid Graveheart in this exchange with Viv

“Come on,” I cajole. “We won’t tattle.”

“You mean your gaggle of hunter buds?”

“You know who my buds are?”

“I see who you sit with in Combat Training. The nerd, the jock, and the sl—”

“Don’t,” I tell him sternly. “Not when we’re just becoming friends.”

“Slob, huntress. I was going to say slob.”

However, our first encounter with Sophia does suggest a rather complicated love life to match the disordered nature of her living space, as we hear her exclaim on the phone

“No number of vintage cars is going to make me want to fuck you again, okay? It’s getting weird. And can you please stop texting my mom?”

Peter (the Nerd) and Elliott (the jock) make up Viv’s other principal allies at Harker. Peter acts a bit like Patrick Head’s Giles in being the fount of necessary wisdom about particular spells and ingredients that become the lynchpin around which the plot turns.

Viv – used to leading a double life – strives and fails to maintain a firewall between new Harker friends with their shared demon hunting activities and her established group of best friend Penny, affluent token boyfriend James and political career chasing mother. The tension between the two lives does generate opportunities for confusion and upset. For example when Penny gets dragged out nightclubbing at a known demon haunt by Sophia, or when James stumbles across Reid and Viv after they have destroyed another exotic deviant from Golden’s fertile imagination, along with the restaurant they were battling the creature in.

While Astera is not a real city, it is undeniably American not least for the political chicanery that Viv’s mother pursues. As the UK parliament votes to restrict use of foreign funding in domestic elections, I remain horrified by the ability of any wealthy person – foreign or domestic – to effectively buy politicians.  Sadly this passage – which should be the most fictitious speculative element in the book is the one that feels most real.

My mother goes on to share all about her pre-mayoral campaign, including that she’ll be announcing her candidacy at the annual Windsor Gala in the spring. She and Caspar think with him as her first backer and all the high-ranking relationships she can draw in, she has a good chance of beating the incumbent.

(FFS in what sane world does your electoral success depend on the wealth and connections of your backers rather than the quality of your policies and your engagement with the electorate! OK I’ll get off my soapbox now, Beth [Its a valid soap box TO!])

Golden’s plot clips along at a good pace through a combination of short chapters and sharp twists and reveals.  Suffice to say Harker Academy is not as safe or secure as an educational establishment should be, while demonic Combat Instructor Reid Graveheart is not the only staff member with a secret filled past. Along the way, with lessons in school, Viv’s work at the museum, and Peter the Nerd’s internal encylcopedia Golden finds plenty of ways to educate the reader in the complex entanglements of creatures and magic that characterize Viv’s world.

The dialogue has some lovely acerbic lines that draw a smile or a laugh.

“We could spar, though,” Elliot suggests, eyes lighting. “In the coliseum. My brothers told me they never clean the blood from the floor after battles.”

Kitty’s nose scrunches. “That can’t be right… or hygienic.”

“Elliot’s brothers are rarely either,” Sophia muses.

And Golden’s prose is speckled with evocative descriptions.

All the shutters and curtains are drawn in the windows across the many buildings except those of the library, which glow like kernels of gold.

Fiona’s already-round eyes go even rounder. I can see white on all sides.

My eyes drift over the empty subway car. The scuffs left behind from kids climbing on tired parents, a smear of lipstick that serves as the only remnant of a date gone well, a wine cork from someone coming home from the most miserable shift of their life.

Of course Half City is not simply a twisting tale of demon hunting. There is the mystery of who the chief Thane of the demonic brood – a kind of Godfather to deviant Mafia – might be and what his plans are. But alongside that is the stop-start will-they-won’t-they thread of forbidden love between Viv and Reid. Now – although Viv is a 21 year old woman and consenting adult – my own background in education does make me uncomfortable with any teacher-student romance. For me that power imbalance is a bit more significant even than that of soul-sucking demon vs child whose father was killed by demons. However, it is the latter dichotomy that initially at least keeps Viv’s urges and passions in check. As the two follow a slightly jerky route from enemies to lovers we get plenty of yearning and gazing. For example

It’s beginning to hurt, this wanting. How much I’m craving his mouth over mine. It feels like sacrilege—yearning for a demon’s tongue against my lips and on my skin. Not taboo because I’m his student—though that gets me going too—but because of my shameful, sick desire for something born from hell.

The story and the romance build to a quite a detailed climax with some hairpin twists as we canter through the denouement. In the last line of her acknowledgements Golden says  “Please don’t hate me for the cliffhangers.” recognizing that the narrative ends at a somewhat teasing point, though the lovers at least have random-walked their way to a satisfying conclusion which accentuates the sense of peril they both face in the final confrontation.

Half City is out this week from Arcadia Books – you can order your copy on Bookshop.org