Book Information
Title: Queen of the Slayers
Published by: Pocket Books
Publish Date: 31 May 2005
ISBN: 1-4165-0240-8
Buffy the Vampire Slayer and her friends have escaped the destruction of the Sunnydale Hellmouth and are hoping to have some time to rest. Unfortunately dark forces are lurking on the horizon and the Cleveland Hellmouth has now become active.
Plot and Characters
Following the events of Season 7 Buffy, her friends and the new slayers are hoping for a period of peace following the defeat of The First’s forces. Unfortunately for them, now that the Sunnydale Hellmouth has been sealed (thanks to Spike) then Hellmouth in Cleveland has become super active. It is now spilling out more uber-vamps and demons than the one in Sunnydale ever did.
Every potential across the world has now been made into a slayer and after taking the gang back to Europe, Giles tries to reorganise the Watchers Council. Buffy heads to Rome after learning that a number of new slayers have been drawn to the charismatic and infamous Immortal.
Meanwhile Faith and Robin Wood head to Cleveland to try and counter the evil spilling out of that Hellmouth.
The lives of Buffy and her friends are complicated by not knowing if they should trust the Immortal, and a rival to Buffy. The rivalcalls herself the Queen of the Slayers, and is trying to convince many of the newly turned slayers that Buffy is only interested in using them to gain more power for herself.
“Sunnydale was only the warm-up”
The Queen of the Slayers attempts to continue the story of Buffy and her friends following the activation of every potential slayer during the final battle of Season 7. The final season of Buffy pitted the Slayer against The First Evil, and unfortunately it was always going to be difficult to tackle a story taking place after that.
There are several factors about the book which may leave the audience a little puzzled, for example after the Sunnydale Hellmouth is shut down, the Cleveland one becomes far more active than Sunnydale had ever been. It makes the audience wonder why The First didn’t work to seal the Hellmouth in Sunnydale and focus its efforts on the super active Cleveland Hellmouth.
In addition the other slayers seem to have little to no fighting abilities and drop like flies. In an episode of Angel Season 5, Angel had to deal with an insane slayer, at the end of the episode Andrew (guest star Tom Lenk) tells Angel that he is taking the slayer with him. To make his point around a dozen girls all walk out of the shadows and the audience knows that they are all slayers. Unfortunately, Queen of the Slayers makes it look as though Angel and Spike could have probably have taken them (despite the fact Spike had no lower arms at the time) because they may be slayers but they don’t know how to fight.
Holder is a writer that uses a lot of description during her novels. She spends the first 40-odd pages of the book describing the bus ride away from the wreckage of Sunnydale and a crash in which a couple of unnamed slayers die. Readers of that style may enjoy the book, but other will wonder why Holder didn't spend a couple of pages on the bus before moving forward.
There are some tie-ins with Season 5 of Angel (that ran for another season after the end of Buffy) with the most notable probably being Andrew getting set to LA but aside from that the links fall pretty flat.
Buffy novels are only occasionally considered to be canon by Joss Whedon (or his office), this is not one of them, and the events seen in the series called The Long Way Home that function as Season 8 completely undermine everything in this book.
Verdict
Fans of the excessively descriptive style of Holder will want to grab a copy; everyone else should leave Queen of the Slayers on the shelf and read The Long Way Home series.
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