City
Of Angels. Run by powerful forces, agents of pure evil. It's a city hard
on its human population. If Angel wants to save himself, he's going to
have save them...somehow. With the help of two unlikely allies - a half
demon and an ex-May Queen - he's going to have to set up shop.
And keep watch over his city.
Just
like BUFFY and CHARMED before it, the first ANGEL novel from Pocket
Books is a straightforward novelization of the premiere episode. After
seeing only the teaser of the first episode, the bit before the credits
roll, I didn't know what to expect from the novelization. And now after
reading it I can only hope that the episode itself is better.
Unlike
any other novelizations I have read, Holder not only uses CITY
OF as source material, but also key scenes from PASSION and BECOMING to help pad out the book. Admittedly
if you're still only getting your BUFFY fix
from BBC2, and haven't bought the other three ANGEL
CHRONICLES books, then this is a good jumping on point. But
if you bought this to know what the first episode of ANGEL is like having read all the other BUFFY books
and watching to the end of season 3, you're in for a disappointing time,
most likely involving skipping half the "flashbacks" to get
to the new stuff. Despite being only 177 pages long, about a third of
this consists of Holder novelizing flashbacks, making the dramatic ending
seem rushed.
Whether
the premiere of ANGEL really doesn't involve
enough storylines to fill out a whole novel, not all the episode had been
filmed, or deadlines were so short that Holder had to resort to previously
filmed episodes to fill out the novel, CITY OF doesn't really offer more than an hour, or two if you read the flashbacks,
of reading time.
Not
really up to the standard of the previous novelizations, but then again
THE HARVEST novelization of the first two BUFFY episodes was not really that good either...
