I like Clay McLeod Chapman because he's always excited to tell his story. There's a pervasive energy in his writing that keeps readers immersed, and a palpable stylistic enthusiasm that just makes for infectious reading. He’s never just writing a scene, just recounting events, but constantly spinning the tale, letting the roots already laid down dig a little deeper into the reader’s mind even as he describes the new growth in the current chapter. He sells his narrative very easily, and be it some trick of his style or Satanic super powers, I never fail to sink into the initial narrative arc of a Chapman novel. 

The Croning features one of the most memorable opening chapters I’ve encountered in recent memory: a grimly whimsical (and slightly horny) retelling of Rumpelstiltskin, in which a royal spy tracks the fabled bargainer to a hinterland and finds that his quarry serves an esoteric deity called Old Leech. The strange god is a primordial cosmic entity who exists in some unknowable outer darkness but regularly makes their presence felt on Earth. The spy returns to his queen with the dwarf’s name, but when the fated day comes round, the hard-won knowledge has no effect, and the imp takes the queen’s child and then brings her and the spy to a bloody end.