[Book Review] The Dead Cat Tails Assassins — P. Djeli Clark
You can’t kill someone already dead. But they sure can kill you. Enter The Dead Cat Tail Assassins.
The newest offering by P. Djeli Clark, famous for his Dead Djinn series is a fun lil’ romp filled with novel quirky characters, enough intrigue, and chock full of quippy snark, all wrapped up by what unites us all… murder!
The Dead Cat Tail Assassins are not cats.
Nor do they have tails.
But they are most assuredly dead.
Hooked by the blurb above, I was curious to see what dark whimsy Clark would spin for us this time around. I enjoyed his debut full-length A Master of Assassins in 2021, but he feels more comfortable in the tighter format of the novella, so The Dead Cat Tail Assassins moves through at a much faster clip, setting up a Venice-like city in Tal Abisi, a perfect, yet slightly stereotypical backdrop for an assassin story. Enter our protagonist, the quite-dead-but-still-kickin’ Eveen. Crowned the “Eviscerator” due to a particularly gruesome instance of… contract fulfillment. This time she is contracted to kill the adolescent Cyeen “Sky”, who may not be who she appears to be.
While The Dead Cat Tails Assassin does not tread entirely new ground in the “assassin dark fantasy” space, it does add just enough flair to keep the story quick and entertaining. The worldbuilding creates imagery of a larger narrative in which case this story fits quite neatly in, and in which Clark is successful. You get all the trimmings of a classic assassin romp, your friendly but utterly deadly rogue’s gallery of fellow and competitor assassins with their own set of arcane skills, with enough hints of a rich criminal underbelly.
It’s hard to put this narrative into an “age” category, though it does tend to veer off into nigh-YA territory, especially with the overly quippy, “everyone’s a comic” style of dialog. Every piece of dialog feels like it was written to maximize dry sardonic humor, and it felt more like a Marvel movie especially with the one-two-dialog-punches between Eveen and Sky through the action set pieces. The climax in particular, while ultimately predictable toed the line between overly grandiose and overly cheesy. Depending on your leanings when it comes to dark YA fantasy, your mileage may vary.
With a healthy dose of murder mystery, lore building, well-written action sequences, and a fun set of characters, The Dead Cat Tail Assassins can be considered a solid addition to Clark’s novella catalog. He creates just enough intrigue to want a full-length novel set in this space. Although, an episodic one-contract-per-novella format of storytelling would be just as successful.
Either way, I would be on the lookout for more un-dead cat-tail assassin shenanigans!
