The Seventh Age: Dawn

Heinz’s debut urban fantasy, a bloated tale of two near-future cities locked in a struggle of good and evil, is overly brutal and terminally repetitive. The Unification is the goal of a long-standing treaty among more than 300 occult groups, who operate from below the Vatican to defeat the rational world. Minneapolis and St. Paul provide the furnace-like backdrop for one of the ritual sites, where the villains consume souls mined by hellish demons out of Chicago’s rich history of death. Heinz’s Chicagoan hero Mike Auburn, who regularly perches on the precipice of death to see the ghosts of the departed, joins the forces opposing the Unification. After Mike defeats the gruesome demon Golgoroth and eats its heart, he becomes demonic himself; this allows Heinz to orchestrate one battle after another, each more horrid than the last. Delilah Dumont, the most notable among Heinz’s paper-thin characters, manages the inflated egos of the various orders’ leaders and believes that the key to a woman’s heart is chemical warfare. In an author’s note, Heinz claims that the novel emerged from “drinking coffee by the truckload late at night”; readers who wade through this welter of undisciplined gore may wish he’d stuck to decaf. (Nov.)