Book Review - Sweeney Boo's Speak of the Devil
Speak of the Devil by Sweeney Boo
Published by: HarperAlley
Publication Date: March 3rd, 2026
Format: Hardcover, 240 Pages
Rating: ★★
To Buy
At the Younwity Hidden Institute of Witchcraft life has not returned to normal since the events that transpired a month earlier on Samhain. Since the botany professor was exposed and sent to prison along with the headmistress. The Coven now has security stationed at the school due to the geological and magical ramifications from Lilith's Samhain ritual of dark spell crafting. A magical fissure that has formed is most likely the cause of all that is wrong at Younwity. Ghosts are off, doorways aren't stationary, there's rain in the dining hall, and great cracks are appearing throughout the building with every tremor that rattles the bones. Because the student body doesn't know the truth about what happened on Samhain they are blaming poor Noreen. Noreen who was a victim of Lilith and who saved the day. She's now ridiculed and scorned. Plus she's suffering from sleepwalking and nightmares. The school has locked her in the highest tower and hopes that her problems will resolve themselves, or at the very least wait until after the fissure is sealed to be addressed. This isn't good enough for Abby. She still feels guilty she wasn't looking out for Noreen enough as her mentor. Which means that Abby is trying to seal the fissure. Sure the Coven has brought in one of their own, Cora Perenell, who specializes in sealing magic, but she appears to be making no headway, in fact the fissure is expanding. Which is why Abby has to succeed. Thankfully she has the help of her friends. But it's getting more and more dangerous for Abby to sneak out at night, let alone create a diversion to get near enough to the fissure. Her latest attempt seems to be succeeding when she's interrupted. Noreen's primary bullies, Cabnus and Rupert, followed Abby to prove that her and her friends are behind everything. Only because of their intrusion Rupert is drawn to the fissure and disappears into it. This is obviously next level bad. So of course the school will want to keep a lid on it. Unfortunately the school's incipient journalist, Atlas Hewett, was on hand to witness the whole debacle. He quite recently realized that wherever Abby and her friends are is where the story is. Which means that Abby has another problem to deal with. At least there's the oblivion of sleep. Or there used to be until she gets what is clearly a prophetic dream. So now Abby and her friends have to seal the fissure, clear Noreen's name, and figure out why Abby is dreaming about the Massachusetts Bay Colony in 1652. A family named Younwity tried to flee Newdory because of the peril of the witchfinder. Aurora and her three children, Diana, Lucius, and Magdalena, summoned the sisterhood, but if Abby's visions are anything to go by, they were too late. Could the past be what is leaking through the fissure to the present? And how dangerous can a powerless witch be?
This second volume in Sweeney Boo's Over My Dead Body series was a chance for her to take the series beyond being just Harry Potter FanFic and really make it her own and she just named a character Lucius. OK, deep breath, moving beyond Harry Potter, time for invisibility cloaking spells. Well, that is a choice. Oh, a hack journalist who has a "niffler" for a familiar!?! Yeah. No. Mole my ass. The point was to move beyond Harry Potter, to form a world of her own making, not just jump ahead a few books in the Harry Potter series to where everything is dark and there's Dumbledore's Army. Even if she wanted to do this just skipping ahead doesn't work because we didn't build to this point and that means the infodump was gigantic. The first book centered on four students and four faculty members, within the first few pages of Speak of the Devil we have an historical family of five who are all important, then in the present there's seven new students of import and two adults. At two-hundred and forty pages this is not a lot of time to develop a story and almost trebling the cast just bogs the narrative down. Throw in horrible Charmed worthy rhyming spells and a "haunting" song from the past that is drawn over the art in the ugliest pink font I've ever seen, and this story, for whatever it's worth within the sphere of Harry Potter FanFic, just feels cheap. Which we, as readers, know is not the case. It's obvious this took years to draw but therein I also have a problem. The style of the art has changed. While an artist's style will never remain consistent, they will change and grow, it's perhaps best if they don't regress. Reading these two volumes back to back you'd expect a little more consistency, but Sweeney Boo's style has changed so much that I felt annoyed looking at this new volume. All the characters had this flatness to their features now. They literally look as if they've been hit in the face with a frying pan. It's disconcerting. But it's nothing to the fact that when the characters are shown in profile the lower portion of their face around the mouth is distorted outward, almost as if they were drawn transforming into a werewolf. Which, for the record, they weren't. Instead you have this weird, unrealistic, beaver profile with a flatness viewed head-on. In the first volume they looked cartoonish but obviously based on humans. Here, they no longer look human. Each and every character is off-putting in their own special way. Though at least messing up the human form and flattening features to make it look like Monkey Christ is something that's happened before. Just look to Cecilia Giménez. Outlining every single character with vibrant color as if they all have a magical aura makes no artistic sense. Even Monkey Christ didn't get a halo. This book needed to narrow its focus to the history of the foundlings and their connection to Diana Younwity thus creating it's own mythology while maintaining the look of the previous volume. None of this came to pass. Sadly.
