10% First Impressions: Burn the Dark by S.A. Hunt

The NetGalley description, and presumably the one on other platforms, for Burn the Dark by S.A. Hunt reads as follows:

Chilling Adventures of Sabrina meets Stranger Things in award-winning author S. A. Hunt’s Burn the Dark, first in the Malus Domestica horror action-adventure series about a punk YouTuber on a mission to bring down witches, one vid at a time.

Robin is a YouTube celebrity gone-viral with her intensely-realistic witch hunter series. But even her millions of followers don't know the truth: her series isn’t fiction.

Her ultimate goal is to seek revenge against the coven of witches who wronged her mother long ago. Returning home to the rural town of Blackfield, Robin meets friends new and old on her quest for justice. But then, a mysterious threat known as the Red Lord interferes with her plans….

And as previously put forth, I'm reading the book as my scrunchies prompt for the #VSCOGirlsReadathon. While it definitely fits the scrunchies prompt, a book with a gorgeous cover, I think my prediction that it might double for the Mario Badescu prompt as an overhyped book might realize.

So far into my 10%, that is the prologue and the first two chapters, the YouTuber aspect of the protagonist's life isn't super huge. You could easily substitute video hobbyist, documentarian, or filmmaker into that description and it wouldn't change the story so far. While that's not what I expected, I kind of like it that way. The reality is content creator is increasingly and has been a viable career path for several years now. Instead of centralizing it to the story, at least so far, we get it as an aside and a vehicle for storytelling. It's already been argued or rationalized to the backburner as a plot point. But then why is it in the description, so prominent? Maybe it'll will come into play later?

Now what I have issues with is a specific character. Without naming names, the description for this character felt like a rip of Lafayette from True Blood. I only saw the TV series, and not even all of it (maybe I didn't see the last season or so), but a Southern Black male with an unusual balance of feminine and masculine attributes, in a diner, giving our white female protagonist advice? Girl. There's so many issues with that, not most of all the Magical Negro trope, but also the weird flavor it gave me. It took me out of *this* book. Should I get reminded of another series in the first chapter. And who knows, maybe Lafayette is a rip off another character. But it's 2020 (in fact I first wrote 2019. Aren't we done with this?

Plot wise I'm invested. I thought we'd see a struggle, conflict, or disconnect between life as a YouTuber and the truth of Robin's supernatural exploits, but no, we don't get that. If that doesn't pop up as a serious plot point besides in joking dialogue later on in the book, then really all this book is is a book about a young witch hunter. Still not made about that as the premise, but will I get sufficient closure in one book? Will this drag out through a series or will each book be relatively well-contained? That remains to be seen.

Burn the Dark by S.A. Hunt is set for publication January 14th.