Corporate life might feel like hell, but it’s nothing compared with the real thing. Brie spends her days at Curated Care fixing broken fax machines, haranguing her colleague Debra to send the weekly sales report on time, and trying to ignore how distractingly handsome her new boss, Luke, is. All simple, until Brie walks in on Luke exorcising a literal demon from Debra. Even then, she’s happy to overlook whatever is going on and return to her humdrum life—until Krystal, her favorite coworker, goes missing, abducted by the same demon that once possessed Debra. Brie demands that Luke take her along on the mission to rescue Krystal, and together the pair descend into the underworld, looking for any trace of Krystal in a very American hell filled with demon bounty hunters, vengeful spirits and deadly bureaucracy. It’s a race against time: The longer they’re in hell, the more they risk losing their humanity. And the longer Luke and Brie are together, the higher the chance that the sparks between them will catch into an inferno hotter than anything hell has to offer.
Mackenzie Reed’s adult debut, I Hope This Email Finds You in Hell, is a charming mix of workplace romance and paranormal adventure replete with steamy tension, easy banter and wry humor. Skewing more toward a traditional romance than an epic odyssey, the novel crafts a satisfying slow burn between Luke and Brie, interspersed with high-octane chase scenes and heartrending depictions of loss and grief. All of this is set against the background of a pale, corporatized mirror image of our own world. Reed’s vision of hell strikes a balance between on-the-nose humor (Where is hell’s Department of Marketing and Publicity? Why, right under New York, of course. The Department of Transportation? California, obviously.) and menacing threat (almost anything in hell seems to be able to kill you). I Hope This Email Finds You in Hell is an action-studded adventure that proves that hell, like everything else in this life or the next, is all about what you make of it.
