Coyote Moon

This is more like it. After a couple of fairly ropey Buffy novels, this one arrives with a much clearer and more interesting central idea, and it manages to carry that idea through to the end.

That’s not to say it’s without its issues. On the minor end of the scale, a travelling carnival full of dangerous or “freakish” people is a fairly well-worn trope in fiction. It’s not the most imaginative concept in the world, but it’s certainly not out of place in the Buffy-verse and is used competently enough here that it never becomes an egregious problem, either. It is what it is, basically.

More frustrating is the way Xander and Willow behave for much of the novel. Buffy works out fairly early on that something is wrong with the carnival and its workers and warns the others that the carnies are essentially were-coyotes and are very dangerous to be around. Despite this, both Xander and Willow continue to socialise with them on multiple occasions and even go on double dates.

Xander doing this is at least believable — he’s a teenage boy being pursued by an attractive, experienced woman who’s openly offering sex, or something pretty close to it. That sort of temptation fits his character perfectly and gives us a chance to hear some pretty fun lines of Xander dialogue. There’s also a subplot involving his date wanting to tattoo him which was curious, although it ultimately goes nowhere despite being referenced multiple times, even fairly late into the novel.

Willow’s motivation is shakier. Her stated reason for the double dates is that she wants to stay close to Xander and keep an eye on him, but she quickly ends up enjoying the situation quite a lot herself, making out with her own carnie and even winning $300 from several of them in a card game.

Throughout the story, both she and Xander repeatedly notice that the carnies seem off — they smell “earthy”, they behave strangely, and Buffy has explicitly warned them about them — yet they continue putting themselves in increasingly ridiculous situations. At times I wondered whether they might be under some sort of spell and I had simply missed that detail, but as far as I can tell that wasn’t it.

We’re also still in that early Buffy phase where Willow is hopelessly infatuated with Xander, something the TV series itself eventually moves away from. As a result, the repeated references to Willow wishing it were her instead of Xander’s date feel a bit tiresome, particularly when you already know that storyline ultimately goes nowhere. Still, these are small quibbles in the grand scheme of things.

The core idea — a carnival of shapeshifters arriving in Sunnydale with plans to resurrect a revered member of their kind who is buried there — is a fun one, and the book is consistently readable. Compared with the previous novels, the writing style is solid and it simply feels focused.

As an added bonus, we don’t get yet another random swarm of zombies like the last two books featured. The police are also referenced and shown to work in ways that feel closer to how the TV series handled them, rather than the monster-fighting force last seen in Night of the Living Rerun.

Part of me would have enjoyed the author throwing in a random vampire appearance at some stage just for fun, if not a touch of variety. Especially since the finale takes place in Sunnydale Cemetery, having a vampire show up and complicate matters just as the story came to its final boss fight would have been an, “Oh, what!” moment and a very Buffy-esque way to throw a cat among the pigeons.

Overall though, I enjoyed this one quite a bit. It doesn’t quite feel like a lost episode of the TV series, but it comes way closer than the other Season One novels so far, and I appreciated that.

My main complaint by the end is that taking out the Big Bad felt a little too easy. Much like the previous book — where Buffy simply stabbed the Master and the story abruptly ended — the final confrontation here is over almost as soon as it begins. Buffy again stabs the Big Bad… once… despite spending a good portion of the novel insisting there’s no way she could fight it at all, and… that’s it.

Even so, it’s a definite step up from the earlier entries. Call it a solid 6.5/10.