Snake-Eater by T. Kingfisher Narrator: Elena Rey
Format: audiobook, ebook
Source: borrowed from Amazon Kindle Unlimited
Formats available: hardcover, paperback, ebook, audiobook
Genres: cozy fantasy, Dark Fantasy, fantasy, horror, magical realism
Pages: 267
Length: 10 hours and 56 minutes
Published by 47North, Brilliance Audio on November 11, 2025
Purchasing Info: Author's Website, Publisher's Website, Amazon, Barnes & Noble, Bookshop.org, Better World Books
Goodreads
From New York Times bestselling and Hugo Award–winning author T. Kingfisher comes an enthralling contemporary fantasy seeped in horror about a woman trying to escape her past by moving to the remote US desert—only to find herself beholden to the wrath of a vengeful god.
With only a few dollars to her name and her beloved dog Copper by her side, Selena flees her past in the city to claim her late aunt’s house in the desert town of Quartz Creek. The scorpions and spiders are better than what she left behind.
Because in Quartz Creek, there’s a strange beauty to everything, from the landscape to new friends, and more blue sky than Selena’s ever seen. But something lurks beneath the surface. Like the desert gods and spirits lingering outside Selena’s house at night, keeping watch. Mostly benevolent, says her neighbor Grandma Billy. That doesn’t ease the prickly sense that one of them watches too closely and wants something from Selena she can’t begin to imagine. And when Selena’s search for answers leads her to journal entries that her aunt left behind, she discovers a sinister truth about her new home: It’s the haunting grounds of an ancient god known simply as “Snake-Eater,” who her late aunt made a promise to that remains unfulfilled.
Snake-Eater has taken a liking to Selena, an obsession of sorts that turns sinister. And now that Selena is the new owner of his home, he’s hell-bent on collecting everything he’s owed.
My Review:
I picked this up because, well, Kingfisher. That’s not going to surprise anyone. Howsomever, based on the blurb, I wasn’t exactly sure where this one was going to fall genre-wise – and now that I’ve finished it I’m still not sure.
Snake-Eater is wrapped around the crossroads where dark fantasy forks between magical realism and outright horror. At the same time, it’s also a bit of cozy fantasy written as a love letter to the author’s old/new home in the desert southwest. And it’s a kind of coming-of-age/coming-into-power story.
Not that Selena isn’t technically an adult – more that she’s been programmed to believe that she isn’t adulting ‘properly’ and has to reclaim that power for herself in a place where some of the old gods, myths and monsters tend her garden and creep into her bed.
Then again, she left a human monster back in the city she left behind. And she’s willing to tackle whatever the desert has to throw at her as long as her dog Copper is safe and she NEVER has to go back.
Which she doesn’t, as long as she can accept that part of what is being preserved out in that desert are old gods and older spirits who can still interact with the humans among them – for both good and ill. One of those gods snuffed out the life of the aunt that Selena came to stay with. Just as the human Walter has nearly snuffed out Selena’s life back in the city. Only a bit more literally. Or maybe not.
But Selena came to Quartz Creek to escape that fate, and she’s not about to let a different monster take the freedom she’s scraped out by her fingernails. All she has to do is beard this monster in his den, with the help of a septuagenarian with a shotgun, a priest who shapeshifts into a peccary, her faithful dog Copper – and all the little animals and spirits that she’s helped along the way.
In spite of herself, Selena has found herself in Quartz Creek, and she’s determined to stay. No matter what it takes. As long as it doesn’t take Copper.
Escape Rating B: Don’t worry, Copper is FINE at the end. I’d have been a whole lot saltier about this one if she wasn’t. But she is.
I started this in audio, but I’m not calling it an audiobook review. Why? Because I listened to less than an hour and realized that I could not continue in audio if I was going to finish at all. I was briefly concerned that I had just discovered the first T. Kingfisher book that I did not like at all and was so bummed by that prospect that I switched to text and it got better.
This is not a criticism of the narrator. Not at all. Rather, this was a case of the narrator being TOO good, in a story whose first-person perspective meant that I was stuck inside a head I didn’t want to be in.
(It didn’t help that I usually see the first-person protagonists of this author’s stories as being avatars for the author’s self. That’s either not the case here, or it’s that Selena represents the author’s past self and not her present. The avatar for Kingfisher’s usual wry, snarkastic and often profane voice in THIS book is the absolutely awesome Grandma Billy, and Selena and the reader don’t meet her until just after I switched to text. It figures.)
The point of this story is wrapped around Selena finding her own place and her own power, after an entire life of being told she was incompetent and utterly wrong and totally ‘less than’. Her mother criticized her every word and every utterance as representative of Selena’s possession by Satan. (Selena’s mother was clearly a LOT in some horrible ways and a bit too similar to the parent of a real-life friend.) But Selena’s mother basically programmed Selena to accept that kind of treatment, so when she met her current partner, Walter, she was so happy to be with someone who accepted her as she was that she didn’t realize until it was much too late that he accepted her as she was because her damage gave him plenty of places to pick at and neg her into compliance – all to make her feel ‘less than’ in an entirely different way.
At the beginning of the story, we’re inside her head as she’s trying to work her way mentally around an act of utter defiance that she feels completely incompetent to carry out. While I certainly sympathized with her plight, her constant negative self-talk while continually NOT talking about the actual problem made for a slow and difficult listen from inside her head.
At least in part because it was obvious what she was dealing with but it was a ‘Chekhov’s Ex’ situation where Walter was the villain who was obviously going to show up before the end and I needed the story to ‘get on with it’. Some of which, I recognize, is a ‘me’ thing and your reading mileage may vary.
Once Selena starts to accept the situation she’s actually in – as utterly batshit insane as some of it definitely is – the story just gets better and better. Also crazier, but in a really, really good way. (Quartz Creek is surprisingly cozy even if it’s also just down the road from Midnight, Texas.) It just takes the story – and Selena herself – a bit of time and mental fortitude, along with more than a little help from her newfound friends, to figure out that she’s finally found the place where she belongs.
And that not just the place is worth defending, but that she herself is as well. That’s a story I was definitely there for, I just needed to read a bit past my usual level of patience for it to get there.