The Legend of the Nine-Tailed Fox by Katrina Kwan Format: eARC
Source: supplied by publisher via Edelweiss
Formats available: paperback, ebook, audiobook
Genres: Asian inspired fantasy, epic fantasy, fantasy, romantasy
Pages: 320
Published by S&S/Saga Press on February 24, 2026
Purchasing Info: Author's Website, Publisher's Website, Amazon, Barnes & Noble, Kobo, Bookshop.org, Better World Books
Goodreads
From the author of The Last Dragon of the East comes a sweeping fantasy adventure with a dash of romance between a nine-tailed fox and the demon-hunter who captures her, banished to the underworld together and forced to form a reluctant alliance in order to escape the circles of Hell.
Yue may be the last of her kind. At night, she stalks the streets of the capital city of Longhao, luring in unsuspecting victims with the mask of a beautiful woman, then consuming them in her true form of the nine-tailed fox.
When she is captured by a powerful demon hunter named Sonam and banished to Hell, she manages one final act of dragging him—and two of his subordinates—down with her.
Now trapped in an abyss with unimaginable terrors, they’ll need each other’s help to navigate Hell and bypass the gods who preside over each circle, each of whom presents the group with a unique and deadly challenge. Forced to depend on one another as they claw their way out of the underworld, both demon and demon hunter discover that there might be more to the other than meets the eye.
My Review:
Yue is a demon. Not the horned and cloven-hoofed demon of Western mythology, but rather the nine-tailed fox of Asian legend, known as a kitsune in Japan, a kumiho (or gumiho) in Korea and, in this particular story, the Chinese húli jīng. Perhaps mixed with just a bit of the kumiho – or at least their signature nine tails.
She may be a demon, she may look like a monster – at least without her magical mask – but she’s not actually evil. She’s all alone after the deaths of her sisters, and she’s just trying to survive the best she can. She’s also an apex predator – at least in her demon form – whose primary diet is, well, us.
She’s alone and she doesn’t want to draw attention to herself so she only takes what she needs to live. And she only takes monsters in human form, the kind of people the world would be better off without. She doesn’t even play with her food – which honestly puts her a bit above her prey who can’t resist toying with their victims before moving in for the kill.
But there is a plague of demons killing and eating their mostly innocent victims all over the city of Longhao. Sonam, the princely ‘Demon-Hunter of Jian’ has promised his royal father that he will kill all the demons in the realm. Sonam hopes that his success will earn him the place at his father’s side that his mother’s lowly birth has kept out of his reach his entire life.
Sonam has never questioned what he’s been taught about demons and their rapacious monstrosity. Not until he meets Yue, both in her guise as a beautiful woman and in her true form as a burn-scarred, nine-tailed, fox. Because she’s not the monster he was taught she would be.
When he brings her before his father, magically caged and seemingly utterly trapped, it’s his brothers who act like monsters, while Yue waits for her opportunity to escape. Instead, his father’s mages open what they believe is a one-way portal to hell. But Yue is nothing if not resourceful. If she’s going to hell, she’s taking the man who captured her along for the ride.
The ride of a lifetime for them both. Because if they want to escape the trap they are now both in, they’ll have to do it together.
Escape Rating A-: It’s interesting how much better the books get when I’m in a better place to read them. Which may be another way of saying that Dorothy was right and “There’s no place like home.” Because I’ve finished three books since we got home and they were all better than most of last week. There’s a lesson there somewhere, but first, there’s a terrific, and terrifically surprising, book to start the week with.
In this Chinese myth-inspired fantasy, Hell doesn’t have a mere seven circles as it does in Dante’s Inferno. That would be too easy. Instead, it has TEN jade palaces, each presided over by its very own demon. A fallen god who represents one of the myriad ways that humans – and gods – can fall from the path of enlightenment. The kind of enlightenment that leads to a decent life in THIS life and a better position on the cycle of rebirth in their next.
So this Hell doesn’t have seven circles, it has 10 demon gods, mixed with a bit of The Fox Wife and wrapped – all nine tails – around horromantasy. Not so much because Yue is a monster, but because Sonam represents the monster in all of us. So, the story in The Legend of the Nine-Tailed Fox sits squarely at the crossroads between mythic retelling, epic fantasy, romantasy and horromantasy – with a touch of enemies to lovers for added depth and tragic potential.
There are so many ways to look at this story, and all of them just make it that much more fascinating. The hell that Yue and Sonam fall into does resemble Dante’s Inferno, but that’s because that’s my go-to-frame of reference. However, it’s really a mythic reinterpretation of Chinese legends of the “Ten Courts of Hell”, each of which is ruled by a judge, who are also based on figures out of legend.
At the same time, the story reads a bit like plenty of epic fantasy stories about battles between good and evil, because one of the judges in those Courts of Hell really is unquestionably evil and has perverted his duty as a judge into a test for recruitment to establish his evil empire – ON THE SURFACE.
But the story is also about the walk through dark places, the journey to get out of the underworld that recalls Orpheus and Eurydice and a whole bunch of other myths and fantasy stories – and tells a cracking adventure tale into the compelling bargain. And that’s the point where the story kicked into high gear and got this reader firmly in its grip.
What tripped this story from fantasy to romantasy, however, is the growing relationship between Yue and Sonam and the way it works out. It should have been tragic, a man falling in love with a monster he’s vowed to kill. But Yue only ‘looks’ like a monster. She isn’t actually monstrous. Instead, she’s rather like many vampires in paranormal romance, in that she doesn’t have to kill to feed AND when she does kill only kills those who deserve it. That Sonam recognizes the truth of her lack of monstrousness as well as the monster that lives within all humans, including himself, takes the romance out of horromance. It’s not like the romance in But Not Too Bold where both the reader and the protagonist know that someday the monster she loves will kill her, but instead turns it into a relationship of equals that neither of them expected at the start.
The Legend of the Nine-Tailed Fox ended up being both more and better than I expected. So much so, in fact, that I’ll probably pick up the author’s first fantasy, The Last Dragon of the East, the next time I’m looking for this combination of myth, adventure and romance.
