A young man grows up without his parents, unaware of the extraordinary truth about his origins. Might he be headed off to Hogwarts?

A warm, loving [and supernatural] family takes in their son’s true love, an attractive and headstrong outsider, who brings a murderous vampire to their door. Must we choose between "Team Edward" and "Team Jacob?"

A world in which faeries, werewolves, vampires, witches, nymphs and demons live side-by-side with humans? Should we get Sookie Stackhouse on the speed dial?

Nope, nope and afraid not.

However, if you fancy a harmonious menage of Rowling’s heroics, Meyer’s star-crossed romance and Harris’s array of creepy creatures, you’ll find a lot to love in Brandon Witt’s phenomenal Submerging Inferno. I’d even go as far as to say, but for its gay protagonist, this one might have literary agents and publishers clambering. But the fact that Witt has managed to pack so much best-seller bait into the first of his Men of Myth books is hardly his most impressive achievement.

In brief, Submerging Inferno tells the story of Brett Wright, a young Southern Californian brought up by his evangelical Christian grandparents who rejected him after he came out to them as a teenager. Now a young man, he leads a somewhat solitary and uneventful life; his only real joy coming from his daily ocean swims. But one evening his whole world is turned upside down after he has a chance encounter with a homicidal bloodsucker and is subsequently rescued by a friendly family of witches who help him hunt the vampire while introducing him to the diverse supernatural world hiding in plain sight.

But Wright’s greatest challenge has less to do with defeating a killer vampire and more to do with understanding who he is and, ultimately, what it means for his future. Through Wright, the author explores the most fundamental under-pinning of Judeo-Christian belief - the concept of choice. Much like Harry Potter, Wright learns that we are defined solely by the choices we make and not by other’s narrow perceptions of who we are. I suspect Witt himself comes from an evangelical background and, as such, has grappled with the stigma attached to homosexuality. So it seems a clever choice to have the main character be an actual demon, making literal the fundamentalist’s "demonization" of the LGBT community. After dealing with his grandparents turning their back on him for being gay, Wright also has to overcome the prejudice of the witches and warlocks whose responses to his demonic origins run the gamut from vague suspicion to outright hostility. The character is forced to question himself at every turn. It’s a bit painful in that it seems to hint at the author's own personal journey as much as his character's. For an ostensibly popular piece of fiction, this is pretty heavy stuff.

While hardly perfect - there’s an overabundance of unnecessary dialogue that could stand a visit with the red pencil (particularly between the two romantic leads who redundantly debate the future of their relationship almost to the exclusion of all else) - this is nonetheless a truly gripping start to what promises to be an epic series. Plus, even though this is only one piece of a larger story, it does pass a critical test in that it can certainly be enjoyed as a stand alone. Even the ambiguous ending struck me as deeply satisfying and yet, at the same time, left me eager for more. Witt has certainly created a world worth exploring. ( )

There are two main points coming to mind as soon as I finished this book: that it’s clear the book is written by a man and that this man is young. I don’t know, maybe is the writing style, maybe is the reference to the “male” prettiness of the main characters, or something else, but to me it was like a mark all over the book. I’m not saying the book is too “virile”, on the contrary, there is a lot of emphasis on the love word, something that usually I don’t find with male writers, it’s only that I felt the “masculinity” of the story.

Aside from that, the author has woven a complex urban fantasy tale, with a mix of fairy tale and paranormal elements. In the middle of this “magick” melting pot, there is the love story between Finn, an handsome and very young warlock, and Brett, a man without roots trying to understand if he is the villain or the hero of this story.

As strange as it sounds, it was almost funny reading their story because they are so young, both of them I think under 25 years old. While Brett is living alone since when he was kicked out by his grandparents, Finn is still living in the comfortable, and welcoming embrace, of his family, a family that is a collection of extraordinary characters. They were never alone, and among the paranormal events they are living, there are also way more “ordinary” events, like being caught while having sex. Actually their same story started in a very conservative way, Brett and Finn paired by Finn’s brother in law on the assumption, you are gay, he is gay, you are both single and under 25… you are perfect together! Even if usually the algorithm doesn’t work like that, in this case it was right, since Finn’s paranormal family will help Brett reconcile with his unknown past.

I’d like to add that the “comfortable” feeling of Brett and Finn’s story, their almost comedy-like relationship, is something that doesn’t extend outside them; any other relationship, sexual or not, Brett is having outside that bond is all other than comfortable, sometime even brutal and for sure scaring. That is probably one of the reasons why Brett clings to Finn, he is able to be “normal” only in the not-normal context of their story. It was quite disconcerting to have this contraposition, horror outside, romance inside, but the author presented it in a way that it worked.

I have to warn the reader, this is book 1 in a series, and so it doesn’t have a real happily ever after, actually it’s not even a happily for now, but I’m confident the author will give us something more in the following books.

http://www.amazon.com/dp/1456558927/?tag=elimyrevandra-20