Manhattan Book Review
Soul Proprietor
By Stephanie Vance
GFB, $19.95, 320 pages, Format: Trade
Star Rating: 4.5 / 5
Soul Proprietor begins with a good hook and knows how to use it. Hell rents souls to the living. Tiffani Lutatio is one of its best salesfiends. She is close to a promotion and wants more. Then she makes one bad move, rents out a recalled soul, and puts her whole climb at risk. From there, Stephanie Vance builds a strange and lively novel about ambition, guilt, and the ugly logic of systems that treat people as units.
The sharpest thing in this book is its view of power. Vance understands that fear does not always come with horns and fire. Sometimes it comes as policy, quotas, and cheerful language used to hide cruelty. Tiffani works inside a machine that rewards speed, greed, and self-erasure. The joke lands because it is funny, but it also lands because it feels close to real life. That gives the novel its bite.
Tiffani is easy to follow because her hunger is plain. She wants to win. She wants status. She wants to rise high enough that the rules stop pressing on her. That clear drive gives the book momentum. As the trouble deepens, Vance lets conscience enter the story by degrees. She does not force a grand moral lesson too early. Instead, she lets the pressure of each choice wear Tiffani down. That makes the change feel earned.
The world around her is colorful without falling apart into noise. Portland, dive bars, demons, angels, and delinquent teens could have turned into clutter. Vance keeps it moving. The best scenes have speed and mischief. There is always one more problem, one more bad bargain, one more turn that pushes the story ahead. The comic voice helps. So does the book’s refusal to act ashamed of its own weirdness.
Not every emotional beat hits with the same force. At times, the novel seems more taken with its concept than with the deeper cost of what Tiffani sees and does. A few readers may want more weight in those quieter moments. Still, the book has style, nerve, and a fresh premise that Vance knows how to work.
Soul Proprietor is funny, dark, and brisk. It takes a wild idea and gives it shape. More importantly, it knows that satire works best when the laughter catches in your throat.
Foreward Clarion Review
SOUL PROPRIETOR
Stephanie Vance
GFB
(322pp)
978-1-967510-80-1
Clarion Rating: 4 out of 5
A sardonic novel that lampoons corporate culture, Soul Proprietor is about a denizen of Hell who upends the existing order of both afterlife realms.
In Stephanie Vance’s humorous fantasy novel Soul Proprietor, a midlevel demon is torn between friendship and her professional ambition.
Number one “salesfiend” Tiffani is tasked with renting out the souls of the damned to desperate mortals in exchange for favors. She’s very good at her job, but even she doesn’t know how souls actually work—nor does she have any interest in finding out. When she stumbles across this information and discovers the dark secret of how Hell and Heaven maintain control, Tiffani has to decide just how demonic she is willing to be to protect her reputation, career, and afterlife.
The story’s fun premise and light, sardonic prose lampoon corporate culture, where mindless obedience is encouraged and “the higher-ups of the lower down” care only for their own pleasure. Hell’s inefficiency leads to declining soul rentals and hated efforts to unionize that have an irrevocable impact on all involved. Tiffani faces a compelling moral dilemma as her ambition and disregard for human morals war with her innate sense of fairness. High stakes increase the tension: Millennia of torture, followed by complete annihilation, await Tiffani and her newfound friends—including a handsome and corruptible angel, a trio of rebellious teenage hackers, and a fellow fiend who proves to be more flexible and less diabolical than he first appears—if she fails to comply.
Amid the metaphysical turmoil are glimpses of an intriguing world, but its full implications are underexplored. Mortals and postmortals coexist in relative peace: Tiffani brings her loyal, fire-breathing dachshund to the local dog park to the dismay of the mortal dog owners, and she enjoys occasional, if risky, outings with her angel friend. Depictions of Hell’s “campuses,” based on the seven deadly sins, range from stereotypical to imaginative. An antagonist’s sudden reappearance after being imprisoned is undercontextualized, though.
Toward the end, some information, as about the true occupation of someone Tiffani met while infiltrating Heaven, is revealed with insufficient buildup, making the penultimate chapters feel rushed. However, a well-executed twist leads to the revelation of even more earth-shattering secrets and momentous negotiations for the future of reality itself. The prosaic nature of these proceedings exists in hilarious contrast to the supernatural situation and the severity of the meeting’s potential outcomes, leading the book toward a fitting finale for Tiffani.
Soul Proprietor is an engaging satirical novel in which people prove to be more complex than simple designations of “good” and “evil.”
Reviewed by Eileen Gonzalez
Midwest Book Review
In Soul Proprietor, Tiffani Lutatio has logged over fifty years working as a salesfiend for Hell’s Soul Exchange, aspiring for a sales record that will earn her promotion to demon and a coveted spot in Hell’s C-Suite. Her record for renting souls has been flawless – until, in her excitement, she breaks a sacred rule of Hell by renting out a porn star’s recalled soul.
Hell hath no fury like a devil’s rules scorned, and so Tiffani finds herself moving from the cusp of all-time success to teetering on the brink of a failure that will haunt her eternally.
The only way out is to make a bargain beyond the devil himself, granting three wishes to her customer. In the process of redemption, she stumbles into a long-held secret that makes her snafu look light in comparison as she romps through a world of Portland bars, mortal behavior, and the dubious effect of developing a conscience over her choices and opportunities.
Soul Proprietor is delightfully difficult to easily categorize. Its supernatural romp through the underworld and mortal affairs will draw fiction readers who enjoy tales of demons, deities, and dilemmas; while those who appreciate undercurrents of humor will delight in how Tiffani confronts the forces that overlay her life:
“Madam chair, I’m just trying to find innovative ways to make more sales. Isn’t that an activity all salesfiends are encouraged to engage in?”
Mr. Abernathy, a Malice C-Suiter who looked like everyone’s meanest teacher in high school, frowned at her. “It’s ‘in which every salesfiend is encouraged to engage.’”
Tiffani suppressed an eye roll. It wasn’t the first time she’d seen a Malice fiend engaged in unrelenting grammar correction. His real crime, though, had been beating the principal of his high school into a coma with a bulletin board because the principal had forgotten the apostrophe in “It’s time for the Spring Fling.”
From her transgression of organizing game nights at her apartment that host mortals, angels, and fiends alike to her confrontation over treachery, her inadvertent impact on her friends when she drags them into her dilemmas, and her wider-reaching impact on Hell itself, Soul Proprietor is at once hilarious, intriguing, unexpected, and delightfully original.
Libraries and readers seeking novels replete with both fun and thought-provoking adventure will find Soul Proprietor just the ticket to recommend to fiction readers who enjoy elements of supernatural encounters, humor, epiphanies, secrets, and funny realizations.