Sign Here

Product Information

The only thing I wish was that this had been Claudia Lux's second or third published work instead of a debut. This reads like a debut. It felt like she had so many great ideas and was afraid of not getting another opportunity, so tossed them all into this book. With more experience, I think her work will soar. This needed a bit more editing and polishing. I just hate that it's already out there. She can't rewrite it. I liked this book a lot but it could have been 5 stars. Just some missed potential which is sad to see. Looking for a fun Halloween-y book that feels like a mash-up between The Good Place, Succession, and The Office?” There are too many POVs, short, impactful chapters, interesting, flawed, peculiar characters in this novel. And surprise, surprise: the incidents take place in both hell and earth. In one, we meet Peyote Trip. He works on the fifth floor of Hell. Meaning he has survived the worst. Now, he is one of those guys that offered you an out when things are bad as long as you sign your soul on the dotted line. He enjoys his trips to earth to get his marks. Pey has in his sights a big target: the Harrison family. Peyote needs a fifth-generation member to sign the contract and he knows he is close to achieving it when a new employee lands on fifth with him. Her name is Calamity and despite him knowing better, he can't seem to stop from wanting to help her. I enjoyed the chapters, characters, and storylines focused on Hell more than the one on Earth (what does that say about me?). Lux did a great job weaving suspense, mystery, and red herrings throughout. Although most of the final reveals were predictable, they were still satisfying. There was a lot of "will he, won't he, oh he better not" going on with a certain character.

Lux’s take is fresh and complex, with deep character development and a plot that will keep readers guessing.” Claudia Lux offers some imaginative and laugh-out-loud descriptions of Hell. On the one hand, Hell is basically an eternal sales job (*shudders*). Everyone has to communicate with beepers, and the music is always whatever they most hated on Earth, and just a bit too loud. The details are a lot of fun and paint Hell as awful, but in a more creative and silly way than usually depicted. I loved that aspect of the novel. Up here it’s not the fire-and-brimstone thing you think it might be. It’s music that’s too loud, food that’s too rubbery, and kissing with too much tongue. Doesn’t sound that bad, right? But don’t forget: it’s forever. I mean for-all-time forever. Not a lifetime. That’s a pebble compared to what I’m talking about. Hell is agitation for eternity. You can’t possibly fathom eternity; your little mortal brain would explode. A century feels like an hour, less with each millennium. With endless time and no peace, everyone breaks eventually.

The familiar, hokey elements present in this iteration of Hell could cause readers to expect characters like TGP’s Michael and Janet, or even someone like Crowley from Good Omens. But the story’s sincerity, mystery and emotional depth would be a departure from that format. It manages to be serious without becoming self-serious, accepting Hell as an inevitability instead of something to be vanquished. Any preliminary similarities noted between Sign Here and those works are eroded after its first sharp tonal switch; the flip between the lighter moments and its capacity for ruthless inhumanity. Basically it’s a lot, but in a good way. I’m not sure which of its moods you’ll finish with by the end, but there’s a good chance you’ll like it. In her debut novel, Sign Here, author Claudia Lux presents a modern vision of hell as a capitalist bureaucracy of the most inane, obnoxious variety. I’d love to reiterate how amazing it is to receive be able to talk about this book and my process like this: it is an absolute dream come true. I know that not all responses to my work will be positive, and I’ve made peace with that (just ask my therapist!). But knowing that these people I made up are out there in the world, in some way impacting strangers far and wide, is thrilling and humbling and I couldn’t be more grateful. I’ve also been blown away by the encouragement I’ve received from other writers.

Special thanks to the publicists at Penguin Random House and to NetGalleyfor providing me with an ARC of this book! Summary

It's a very interesting, unsettling and attention grabbing interpretation of hell and my favorite bits of the book definitely involved Peyote and his interactions with this co-workers, and the brief but horrifying glimpses into the punishments they mete out and experienced first hand in hell's ever revolving hierarchy. It's a harsh juxtaposition between these moments and the relative mundanity of the Harrison family vacation but I feel like they suited each other well and made for an interesting reading experience overall. It's here I must admit that I'm underselling the Harrison's storyline a bit but it's your typical domestic thriller so I don't want to give anything away there really. This is not an easy book to categorize, which is part of what makes it such a compulsive read. Claudia Lux has written an incredible novel that has a little bit of everything: thrilling twists, a fast-paced plot, lots of hidden agendas, dysfunctional family drama, and sharp, witty writing. Despite literally being set in Hell, this is not a bleak, heavy novel. It’s funny. And on top of everything else, it’s a moving story with a surprising amount of heart. It got really messy in the end and became almost impossible to keep storylines and characters in line. The bars serve only Jäegermeister instead of cold beer is definition my own kind of hell! Happy belated birthday to this dark comedy meets twisty thriller! 🥳🍺 In one storyline, we follow Peyote, a dealmaker from Hell whose job is to sign as many souls into Hell as possible. He is forced to work with Cal, another dealmaker, but they are keeping secrets from each other. In another storyline, we follow the Harrison family as they go to their summer house for their annual vacation. But secrets abound there too.

Conceptually, Sign Here has potential. But the execution makes it feel like several disjointed stories instead of one cohesive whole. So now I had a world to explore, and a character to explore it. For the Harrisons, it started in a similar — albeit ultimately quite different — way: with a location. When I was a kid, I went to my mom’s friend’s home on a lake in New Hampshire every summer, and it was the most magical place, full of opportunities for imagination. So when I needed a home base for a family, I pulled directly from that house, and the characters (nothing like the family I knew growing up, by the way!) formed around it. Berkley Publishing Group and Claudia Lux provided a complimentary digital ARC of this novel via NetGalley. This is my honest review. Opinions are mine alone and are not biased in any way. Publication date is currently set for October 25, 2022. This review was originally posted at Mystery and Suspense Magazine. One of my favorite memories from writing this book was one night, when I was wrapping up, I decided to write the first sentence of the next chapter, just so I could have something to start off with when I returned. So there I was, a little loopy from sitting alone in my study for hours on end late into the night, and I got this kind of cheeky, mischievous feeling, like right before you challenge someone to eat a pepper you know is super-hot, and I typed: ‘Calamity Gannon, humanThe Harrisons seem like any other family: husband, wife, two kids. Except they all have secrets. As they head to their lake house for the summer, Peyote and his coworker, Calamity, are in pursuit. But nothing goes as planned for either party. As soon I read the first line of Sign Here, I wanted to read more. It turned out I did have a lot of ideas about what Hell might be like. Author Claudia Lux managed to replace many of them with some of her own. One plot focuses on a demon(?)/ former-human-suffering-eternal-damnation in Hell and his new coworker/buddy, Cal. This was the plot that had drawn me into this book, as the author seemed to have an original take on Hell-- the closer to the "Downstairs" you got, the worse your suffering. Naturally, our MC, Peyote Trip, is on one of the more "comfier" levels of Hell, where the extent of his suffering is immeasurable puddles, bars that only serve jägermeister, and radios that play solely your least favorite music. It was highly remeniscient of The Good Place at first, but got old really fast, especially in how cyclical and repetitive it was. This is one of the rare moments where a book is completely original. I can't relate it to anything and that deserves high praise. Overall: the ending was spectacular. The sarcastic, entertaining, intelligent writing enchanted me!