Slayers is an 8 hour story, written by Amber Benson and Christopher Golden, that brings back many of the original actors to reprise their roles from Buffy the Vampire Slayer (AKA my favourite TV series, ever). But I’m going to try to be objective in this review, and not just spend 250 words squealing about James Marsters amazing return to Spike and how fun it was to hear these old friends again.
Going into this audiobook, I stupidly assumed that this would be a typical audiobook and that the actors would merely be speaking anything that would normally feature between quotation marks. How wrong I was! I’m sure there is a proper term for what exactly this was, but it wasn’t an audiobook in the classic sense. It was like a Radio Play or something? I’m not sure (tell me in the comments, if you know!). There is no narrator, unless you could Spike monologuing now and then. It’s literally actors reading lines, with punching sound effects added in during fight scenes.
Not going to lie, I really struggled with this format and it took me about halfway through the ‘book’ for me to get a bit more comfortable with it.
So: what worked? A return to Sunnydale and my favourite characters (sans Buffy herself, who was hand waved away as ‘in Europe’ or otherwise elsewhere). Anya, Giles, Cordelia. Even Jonathon! It was wonderful to hear the voices of my favourite characters again. Now, for those Buffy fans, you’ll immediately be confused. How could Anya and Cordelia make an appearance (IYKYK). Well, multiverse hijinks. That worked very well as a way to bring characters back together, and I was 100% on board with the concept. The story continued on from season 7 of the TV show very nicely.
What didn’t work? Unfortunately, the biggest issue for me was Tara’s turn to the dark side, which did not land for me. I understand she wrote the story (kudos!), and she did a fine job at that. But the actor was not convincing at being evil. Tara’s character is too pure and every time her evil persona spoke up, it fell flat. There were also some strange decisions to include a monkey, Mr Jingles or something, with Tara’s storyline. I think it was so she’d have someone to ‘talk to’ to explain her journey, but having a monkey screech and chitter randomly in ‘conversation’ with Tara was pretty lame. I would much rather if the character had done her exposition dumping with herself – dark side talking to light side or something – rather than cramming in a random monkey.
But overall, I enjoyed this story, the direction, and how it extended upon the Buffyverse. For a die hard fan, there’s a lot to love here.
Overall, 3 convenient Gem of Amara’s out of 5.