Daemonica (Wicked Games, #3) Book Review and Summary
-
Victoria Smith - 01 Sep, 2026 21:18
Author: Kaylie Smith
Page Count: Unknown
Publication Date: Expected publication 2026 APL
Grief is not a neat little package you set on the mantelpiece; it is a rotting floorboard you step through when you are least expecting it, plunging your whole leg into the dark while the rest of the room goes on drinking tea. And yet, the publishing industry insists on dressing this agony up in leather corsets and hellfire, as if losing a brother can be solved by winning a bloody tournament against a secret society of demons.
Kaylie Smith is bringing us Daemonica, the next installment in a series that evidently requires teenagers to survive mortal combat just to reclaim their own ancestral property, and I find myself staring at the synopsis with a cold, heavy ache in my chest that has nothing to do with fantasy and everything to do with the quiet shattering of a household.
Gwendolyn loses her brother, which should be the emotional anchor of the entire narrative—an anchor heavy enough to drag the reader down into genuine, suffocating sorrow—yet we are immediately hurdled into a ridiculous bureaucratic hostage situation where the dead boy gambled away the family estate to hell’s most exclusive fraternity.
Death is final.
It leaves a dinner chair permanently empty.
It does not leave behind a real estate dispute.
And then, of course, enters Sevin Silver—because what is a grief-stricken sister to do without her gorgeous, annoying first love showing up to complicate the blood-soaked games with his own secret agenda involving a dying mother?
Wait.
Actually, let me walk that back for a second.
Perhaps the ridiculousness of the premise is precisely the point, a garish neon distraction from the unbearable weight of mourning, because when your heart is broken into jagged pieces, sometimes you just want to read about attractive people trading witty banter while dodging literal hellfire.
Or perhaps I am simply projecting my own exhaustion onto a plot that refuses to sit still with its own wounds.
Smith is leaning hard into the modern romantic fantasy playbook—think Tracy Wolff or Jennifer L. Armentrout dialed up to a frantic, neon-lit pitch—where high-stakes competition serves as a flimsy excuse for forced proximity and unresolved sexual tension.
Yet underneath the marketing gloss about ruthless rules and merciless games, a more interesting anxiety pulses through the premise: the terror of losing everything your family built, of watching your lineage vanish because the people you loved made catastrophic, irreversible mistakes.
Gwen is not just fighting for a house; she is fighting for the last physical remnants of a brother who left her stranded in the wreckage of his absence.
She wants the walls that remember him, the floors that still echo with his footsteps, even if those walls now belong to the damned.
And Sevin, with his desperate quest for a magical cure, mirrors that exact same frantic refusal to accept loss, turning the arena into a pathetic, beautiful collision of two people who do not know how to say goodbye.
We read these books because we want to see people fight death and win, even when we know damn well that in the real world, no amount of dark magic or bargain-bin deals will ever bring back what was stolen from us in the quiet hours of the night.
The baby monitor just illuminated with terrifying activity.
