I wish Booksburners was a novel
My spoiler-free thoughts
Well, technically it already is a novel. Bookburners was originally written as a serialized fiction novel in episodes — more like TV show than a movie. Later it was adapted into an audio drama for Realm podcasts, which is where I encountered it.
That said, the entire work is fantastic — its a fantasy readers dream. The work centers around a group of Vatican priests, and friends, fighting the evil forces of magic in the world, unleashed by books. As a lover of the written word, books have always been my gateway to magic. In this world, it also happens to be true.
Detectives, priests, academics, and other impactful team members seek out magically disturbances emanating from magical books, neutralize them, and then store them in the Black Archives — a secret library within the Vatican. We also get a cast of characters you truly care about, and watch them grow over the variety of missions they are sent on.
With that said, the story is locked into an episodic format and does veer into “monster of the week” territory. Each episode has a contained story line with an objective for the team, and this builds throughout the season towards a bigger issue and resolution.
The author spend a lot of time on character work, which is likely the reason I kept coming back for more. However, often we got to the pinnacle of an episode with only a few minutes to resolve it. I would have listened to over a hour of rising action, to have the resolution in less than five minutes.
I also wanted to spend more time on the “big bad” rather than a series of “medium bads”. The overarching story was fantastic, and needing to fit that episodic format sometimes got in the way of how big the story could have been. Those key moments of a story that you can’t stop reading, but somehow last the longest in your memory were those exact ones that Bookburners cut short.
I felt a little robbed of that satisfaction of a story well ended, that after-glow that I knew was so close. I felt hustled onto the next episode, instead of languishing in the resolution of a scary moment for these characters I now saw as my friends.
Knowing that this was intended for a serial format, I don’t have hopes of it going back into a single story line. But I do hope that as the three outstanding seasons are released in audio format, that the story digs into the larger magical issues it contends with and releases the weekly monster motif that often plagues early seasons of detective shows. No one wants another Supernatural.
Bookburners is a Realm production voiced by Xe Sands, originally created by Max Gladstone for Serial Box. Written by Max Gladstone, Margaret Dunlap, Amal El-Mohtar, Mur Lafferty, Andrea Phillips, and Brian Francis Slatery.