The Devil Pulls the Strings is a dark fantasy novel with the pulse of a supernatural thriller and the sweep of an adventure story. It follows Boone Daniels, a Missouri musician and Ren Faire jouster who has spent twelve years trying to prove that his parents did not simply vanish, but were taken by something monstrous and tied to cursed Paganini music. When Boone is pulled from his small-town life into New York, secret societies, occult history, Slavic myth, and a dangerous search involving three pieces of forbidden music, the book turns into a chase through music, memory, grief, and fate.

The author writes like he wants every chapter to move, and they do. Boone’s voice has an authentic roughness that makes the story feel immediate, especially because the novel leans into his synesthesia, eidetic memory, panic, and stubborn need to be believed. That choice gives the book its identity. Music isn’t just background here. It becomes texture, pressure, color, taste, and threat. I liked that a lot. It makes the fantasy feel embodied instead of decorative. At times, the novel throws a huge amount at the reader, with lore, organizations, artifacts, and side characters arriving fast, but I also think that abundance is part of its charm. It feels like opening a big old trunk and finding it packed with strange objects, scraps of legend, and one more story than you expected.

The mix of themes is bold. Slavic mythology, Paganini lore, fairy tale logic, secret archives, vampire assassins, Renaissance fairs, and a hero from a trailer park should not fit together this smoothly, and yet a surprising amount of it does because Boone is such a sincere center of gravity. He’s bruised, funny, desperate, and often overwhelmed, which gives the story heart. The romance thread with Sapphire and the idea of cursed music could have tipped into melodrama, but the book usually keeps itself grounded by returning to Boone’s grief and his need to make sense of what happened when he was six. That gave the bigger fantasy machinery some emotional weight. I was especially interested in how the novel treats talent as both a gift and a burden. Music opens doors here, but it also asks for blood.

I would recommend this most to readers who enjoy genre fiction that is earnest, busy, imaginative, and unafraid to go big. If you like dark fantasy, occult thrillers, myth-soaked adventures, or stories where music itself becomes dangerous, there is a lot here to enjoy. I think readers who want ultra-minimal prose or a very restrained plot may not click with it in the same way. But readers who are happy to follow a wounded, sharp-edged hero into a world of cursed art, hidden histories, and supernatural conflict will probably have a very good time with this one. It feels like a book written by someone who loves stories enough to pack in everything that fascinates him.

Pages: 252 | ISBN : 978-1736401309