Stake Sauce has a lot of things I like: a cast of queer (aka not straight) characters of color, a punk fashion sense, friends-as-family/found families, and urban magical creature shenanigans. As soon as I read the blurb, I wanted to dive in and love this. After reading though, I think Stake Sauce is a few drafts away from a full five stars.

After the brutal death of their coworker Felix, friends Jude, Eva, and Jasper quit being firefighters and work at a shopping mall in Portland. Their coping mechanisms and grief drive them down different paths: Eva is the mall superintendent and focused on the future; Jasper changes personas like he's trying to live every kind of life while running a cross between a thrift store and little shop of horrors; and Jude fancies himself a good mall cop and a vampire hunter seeking justice for Felix's death. And then in drops Pixie, a newly turned vampire who wants to escape his creator and get the older vampires to stop bullying him.

So yeah, there's a lot going on. Sylver's serial fiction is highly character-driven, and each person feels fully formed on the page, even if they don't let the reader in on their secrets. We learn the most about Jude, who is the POV character, but each character's arc is so realized that it feels like any of them could have told the story. The conflicts and plot feel organic, and the fact that I could guess the end twist doesn't bother me so much. The Portland setting feels uncanny and spooky, friendly and unfriendly all at once. As other reviewers have noted, mental health, death, grieving, consent, and (romantic) friendship are big, well-developed themes.

This love of character and theme is all well and good, but unfortunately, and I can already feel a flush of embarrassment crawling up my neck, I didn't like Jude. Who is the POV character. Who we learn the most about. And spend the most time with. After a certain point of Jude being Jude, the story tanked for me.

I can't decide whether Jude is too much like me and my disaster of a self, or too opposite of me and my remaining logos functionality. Jude says he goes out nightly to hunt vampires. There's pages and pages of talk about how to properly deal with trauma and facing truth. This gave me the impression that Jude knew what he was doing. He talks a big game, says he's done research. I believed him.

Reader, he does not know what the f*ck he is doing. He freezes mid-vampire attack not once, but three times. The writing yanks itself into an entire PTSD flashback mid-action scene. Before the final battle, as it were, Jude makes a huge deal about getting the key to the tunnels, how he might not come back alive, but then arms himself with blood-laced steak sauce and nothing else! Another character comes onto the scene who plainly knows what she is doing, and Jude has the utter gall to question her at every turn.

It was too much for me. I'm unsure if Jude's recklessness was meant as PTSD symptoms because he also about wallowed in how "well" he faced the trauma of Felix's death. There's facing fears and then there's facing fears unprepared and getting murdered. You don't do the later, let alone repeat the later, and claim any mental wellness. His audacity ran into the Green Principle, where I start losing sympathy with a character if they're too much of an idiot. In addition to the Green Principle activating, a mysterious character's name is accidentally revealed in narration and a non-Catholic character receives hand wounds and repeatedly calls them Stigmata wounds. The book lost me there.

While reading, I could tell Sylver wrote the piece to dwell on themes and the characters, particularly the disability, ace/aro, polyam, gay, and transgender representation. Whatever else I think about the story, I know that the rep and themes of the work are important to a lot of people, and I wouldn't want to change those aspects. My reaction to Jude and my disappointment over other details don't take away from the other good writing going on in Stake Sauce. Jude's not my cup of tea, but I'm looking forward to Moon-Bright Tides, which I also have on my Kindle. While I'm not going to recommend Stake Sauce to everyone, I will recommend it to everyone thirsty for good queer representation. That's where the story shines.