review: if found, return to hell
Em X. Liu's If Found, Return To Hell is a novella I found perfectly pleasant to read despite feeling frustrated and/or dissatisfied with most of its choices.
Our hero, Journeyman Wen, is a disaffected intern at a wizarding support hotline in a world that, despite having magic, is much like our own in its reliance on the thankless toil of wage labour. Their discontent leads to an off-the-books handling of the strange case of a college kid's possession by none other than a prince of hell on the lam. This is a charming premise!
I suspect I would have enjoyed this book more if it were either a short story or a novel; the former might have been tighter and more potent in its focus and the latter would have the leg room necessary for richer depth of its characters and relationships. Most of the characters felt thin, with the exception of the protagonist's colleague Nathaniel, who is the kind of cool girl coworker milking a crap job for what she can that I've known and admired many a time. Characters who met within the scope of the novella speedran interpersonal intimacy to land in a found family place that felt largely unearned.
The pacing in the back half felt rushed and everything wrapped up too neatly for my taste, despite liking the general idea of the way the climactic confrontation gets resolved. Both the pacing and plot issues speak to insufficient sense of conflict and stakes.
I was also unconvinced by the choice to use second person POV rather than first, which would similarly accomodate the nonbinary protagonist reveal (a choice about which I have mixed feelings to start with /grumpynonbinaryperson.) Despite being a second person POV apologist, the affective alienation of second person didn't land for me here. I would rather have had a stronger and more distinctive voice which could have accomplished some of that estrangement through qualities of its narration rather than the second person POV brand of detachment.
Even so, it's a quick read and memorable entry in the field of urban fantasy/magic bureaucracy fiction, a mode in which it's at its best. The depiction of miserable corporate drudgery was horrid in a good way. Also, the pleasure of encountering an unexpectedly nonbinary protagonist has not lost its lustre, even if I had quibbles with the delivery.