Colin Gets Promoted and Dooms the World by Mark Waddell 
Published by Ace Genres: Fantasy
Pages: 384
Format: eBook
Source: Netgalley
I received this book for free from Netgalley in exchange for an honest review. This does not affect my opinion of the book or the content of my review.
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WARNING! Under no circumstances must employees strike a deal with unauthorized personnel on Dark Enterprises property. Such behavior could result in death…or the end of the world.
Colin is a low-level employee at Dark Enterprises, a Hell-like multinational corporation solving the world’s most difficult problems in deeply questionable ways. After years of toiling away in a cubicle, he's ready to climb the corporate ladder and claim the power he's never had.
The only problem is, he’s pretty sure he’s about to be terminated. Like, terminated. That's tough, because his BFF has just set him up with a great guy. In fact, maybe he's a little too great. And asks a lot of questions...
When Colin meets a shadowy figure promising him his heart’s deepest desire, he can’t resist the urge to fast-track his goals. In return for a small, unspecified favor, he asks for the one thing that will improve his life: a promotion.
But that small favor unleashes an ancient evil. People in New York are disappearing, the world might be ending, and Management is starting to notice. Getting to the top is never easy, and now it’s up to Colin to save the world. It's the ultimate power move, after all.
Doomsday has never been so fun!
I think we can all agree that it isn’t a great idea to make a bargain with a dark entity, especially one asking for a favor to be named later.
Colin mostly enjoys his work at Dark Enterprises, a company where the rich and powerful comes for…favors. Really, the tortured screams flowing down the hallways and a little blood spatter on your clothes, isn’t too bad. Every job has some inconveniences, right? The coffee’s good. While Colin wants to someday make his way up to the thirteenth floor with the executives, he knows that his job in Human Resources is important too. His biggest problem right now has the name, it’s Sunil. Sunil is the Assistant to his boss, Ms. Kettering, and after Colin turned down Sunil and his sexual harassment, Sunil has been sabotaging Colin’s work. Now Ms. Kettering has given Colin to the end of the week to clean up his act or he will be terminated…and by terminated, Dark Enterprises means they will be sending out the firing squad to make sure you stick by your NDA clause permanently. Colin is trying to get around Sunil’s sabotage with little luck and the clock is ticking.
When Colin in asked to escort a visitor up from transportation (i.e. the interdimensional gateway on the 7th floor), the entity within the expensive suit and face hidden in a deep cowl offers Colin its business card and an offer too good to be true, it will help give Colin his deepest desire, if Colin promises to help it at a later date. Yeah, so it does sound too good to be true, but when Colin believes the firing squad is closing in on him, he grabs that business card, cuts his finger and says a little chant, and suddenly…nothing. Okay? But at least the people stalking him have disappeared. Maybe it was false alarm.
But the next morning, Colin’s life suddenly takes a turn towards the future he has dreamed over. He is brought to the thirteenth floor to work as the Assistant to the CEO herself, Ms. Crenshaw. And then his roommate Amira introduces Colin to Eric, the most beautiful, amazing man Colin has even seen. He can already imagine his new future where he and Eric and their two rescued pugs, Sunny and Cher, relax in their artfully decorated penthouse apartment. Until the entity comes knocking for his favor. A little more blood, a little more chanting, not so bad…except Colin has now released the binding on an Abomination who is suddenly free to feast on everyone in New York City. That’s not so bad…right? Young/old, fat/skinny, rich/poor, everyone on the isle of Manhattan is now a yum, yum snack, except Colin who gets to be its final snack.
Every cloud has a silver lining. I guess the silver lining here is that the entity’s snacking has opened up a few positions in middle management and Ms. Crenshaw has indicated Colin could move up–as long as he can impress the Board and as as long they haven’t already all been devoured. The only thing Colin can think of that might impress the Board is finding the Abomination and re-binding it. That shouldn’t be so hard, hmm? If only he knew how to make that happen.
With the a little help from Lex down in the archives, they will try to figure out how to save the world before it is too late…and maybe still get Colin his chance at middle management.
THOUGHTS:
I don’t know what it is but I absolutely love anything mixing the mundane and the supernatural, like vampires getting an office job for the great dental. Here Colin works for Dark Enterprises where the rich and powerful come in for favors and a little blood ritual, some black magic and maybe a soul or two in transfer, and they get more than they bargained for.
Colin is just a paper pusher in the HR Department, but he really likes it at Dark Enterprises. Colin is a nice guy who has been bullied a lot, which has caused him to have a bit of dark edge. I think that dark edge makes him even more relatable as a character, or maybe that’s just me. He dreams of getting back at his co-workers who belittle him, especially Sunil who has been trying to get Colin terminated simply for turning down his advances.
I consider myself a nice person but if I could push a couple of people out an interdimensional gateway into the abyss, where the may or may not be tortured forever in an endless void…I’m not saying I would…Okay, I absolutely would. Bye-bye. So I get it. Colin wants to be respected and he has ambition, and he isn’t against using a little black magic to get there a little faster, but the pressing need to avoid termination is a definite factor here. If he wasn’t afraid for his life, would he have made the bargain in the first place? He knew it was a bad idea, and he tried to not give in, until that moment when he thought the company was coming for him.
I also enjoyed the secondary characters we meet such as Amira, Colin’s roommate; Lex, in the research department; and even his boss, Ms. Crenshaw, was a scary boss but still kind of supportive in a “don’t disappoint me” vibe.
I thought this story was quirky and fun with more than a touch of dark humor.
Favorite Scene:
“Please don’t do this!” The young woman whimpered. “Please!”
She struggled as she pleaded for her life, but the leather straps securing her to the huge block of basalt had been fastened with expert care. As she stared up at the robed and hooded figure looming over her. I could see that her pupils were enormous, blown wide with fear or some other emotion. I was standing at her feet, an iron bowl clutched in my hands, shivering in the cold air of the subterranean chamber. So far, I felt a little queasy. It was too late to back out now, though.
Rhythmic chanting rose and fell behind me, coming from the thirteen black-robed figures gathering in a semicircle in front of the sacrificial alter. The celebrant standing over the victim raised a wicked-looking knife into the air, its blade gleaming in the flickering light of the hundred candles, and as they did so the chanting rose to a hoarse crescendo. The woman tied to the alter writhed and gasped, her gaze now fixed on the blade hovering overhead. With a convulsive movement, the celebrant plunged the knife downward and the woman let out a bloodcurdling scream of primal terror that rang against the dark stone of the chambers walls. Then the scream died along with the chanting, both cut off with brutal finality. The celebrant held out a hand to me and I hurriedly passed them the bowl. In the tense silence that followed I heard the thick patter of blood dripping into the ceremonial vessel.
For the space of several heartbeats, no one moved. The celebrant laid aside the blood-tipped knife and I heard a sound like tape ripping. Then the overhead lights came on and I blinked in momentary confusion as everything receded to banal normalcy. The cantors relaxed into murmured conversations, throwing back their hoods and reaching into hidden pickets for their phones. The celebrant pushed back their cowl as well to reveal the plump features of Mr. Samuels, and as he stepped back from the alter, the young woman sat up, her bonds untied, a cotton ball taped to the inside of her elbow. A bright sticker on her T-shirt announced, I Gave Blood Today!
Clumsily, I wrestled with the straps at her feet until I was able to free her, at which point she beamed a smile at me and nimbly hopped down from the jagged piece of black rock. She gave Mr. Samuels a big hug before traipsing down several rough-hewn steps by the chamber floor.
“I noticed that you didn’t, uh, kill her,” I murmured as I drifted closer to Mr. Samuels.
He shook his head as he fished his monocle from a pocket under his robes and perched it in front of his right eye. “No, no. Too much trouble. It’s terribly difficult for people to go missing these days. They leave traces everywhere and then we have the police knocking at our door, asking inconvenient questions about ‘cell towers’ and ‘triangulated signals’ and ‘social media posts.'” His pudgy fingers shaped air quotes around these phrases as if they were incomprehensible technobabble. “It’s not like the old days, when you could sacrifice someone in an abandoned building and quietly dispose of the body with no one the wiser.” He sounded wistful as he said this, his gaze turned inward as if recalling better times.
Remembering what Ms. Crenshaw had told me, I wondered how many people Mr. Samuels had murdered back in the day to secure the shallow ambitions of Gilded Age socialites. “So who is she?” I asked, glancing at the sacrificial “victim.”
“Hmmm? Oh, Leslie. Lovely girl She’s doing this for college credit, you know. Wants to be an actress and thought this would be a good way to ‘tap into her instrument,’ whatever that means.” Samuels smiled with genial fondness as he watched Leslie chat with some of the cantors, a sugar cookie in one hand and a plastic cup of orange juice in the other. “She does an awfully good job of pretending it’s real, doesn’t she? So many sacrifices just lie there and wait for it to be over, or worse. Last week I had a young man check his phone in the middle of the ritual.” He shook his head. “Really spoiled the moment. Very disheartening. No respect for the work we do here.”
I nodded along. “Sure, right. but if you’re only taking a little blood, why not set up a blood drive or something? You know, comfy chairs, IV bags, that sort of thing. Why do you need”–I gestured at the alter with its ancient stains, the candles that still flickered from every surface–“this?”
Folding his hands together over his ample middle, Mr. Samuels looked up at me from beneath his bushy eyebrows. “The trappings of ritual are not for our benefit, Colin. We do this to propitiate the Old Ones, the dark gods that sleep restlessly beneath this reality. They are sticklers for tradition, for the rites and practices that They taught to the first practitioners thousands of years ago.” He paused and then sighed faintly. “We’ve done what we can to modernize things, but it’s slow going. I mean, some of the Oldest Ones have only just come around to the idea that virgin’s blood can come from males as well as females. We’ve started introducing Them to the concepts of nonbinary and intersex blood, but I think that’s going to take a while.”
