Opposing these dire wolves in sheep's clothing is the Lumina, a scrappy, ragtag band in the service of Reason that includes an enigmatic leader named Kenntnis (which, the author helpfully supplies, means "knowledge" in German); Richard Oort, a sexually tormented cop who by a twist of fate proves able to wield the one weapon feared by the Old Ones and their servants; Rhiana, a young witch with a shocking secret in her past; and Cross, an Old One who has at least partly come over to the side of the good guys.

Rhiana is a powerful magician who also happens to be a physics student, a combination that makes her valuable to both sides. Initially rescued from a demonic attack by Richard, who becomes her protector, she is ambivalent about where she stands in the conflict. Richard, on the other hand, has no magical abilities at all, which makes him, in his own way, equally or more powerful, because it allows him to wield a magic-negating sword. Unfortunately, he is also the survivor of a traumatic betrayal that has left him sexually shut down; as that part of him begins to reawaken, spurred by feelings for Rhiana and an attractive medical examiner named Angela Armandariz, his fragile self-control begins to fragment, a process that is not helped by the fact that everything he is learning from Kenntnis directly contradicts his strongly held Christian faith. Cross, meanwhile, began as an Old One, an extradimensional entity that crossed over into our world to feast on raw human emotions just like the rest of his kind but in the process became infected by various beneficent divine memes, such as Christ, all of which he somehow holds inside himself simultaneously ... most of the time.

The bad guys are led by Mark Grenier, a slimy evangelist who fronts the World Wide Christian Alliance and just happens to be acquainted with Richard's uptight control freak of a father, Robert Oort, a federal judge possessing all the warmth of the cometary cloud with which he shares a name.

As Grenier attempts to suborn Richard—or, failing that, steal his sword—a secondary assault, via magical back channels, is launched against Rhiana in hopes of swaying her allegiance.

Lacking in both edge and reason

The jacket copy almost libelously compares The Edge of Reason to The Golden Compass and the Illuminatus! trilogy; a more fitting comparison is to Waking Brigid, an enjoyable if flawed first novel that unpretentiously touches on many of the same religious and spiritual themes as Snodgrass' book but does so with greater passion, clarity and craftsmanship. Waking Brigid is the kind of novel you keep reading despite its faults; The Edge of Reason, on the other hand, is the kind that—unless you are a professional reviewer—you very well might throw down.

First, the struggle between dark and light on which Snodgrass hinges her book is presented in the starkest possible terms. There are no shades of gray, only blacks and whites. Grenier is not just a fundamentalist: He is a caricature of one. Similarly, Kenntnis, reprising a role familiar from movies like The Day the Earth Stood Still and novels such as Childhood's End, is a stereotype of benign paternalism. Scenes with Kenntnis dissolve into boring lectures; those with Grenier implode with strident melodrama. Worse, the underlying structure of the conflict between the Old Ones and the Lumina is not fleshed out, and one senses that it hasn't been thought out, either. As an agnostic, I'm always happy to see scorn heaped upon organized religion, but Snodgrass seems to want it both ways. She doesn't really set up an opposition between magic and science, reason and superstition, but instead between what are essentially two systems of magic.

The plot reflects this overly simplistic or insufficiently developed dichotomy, with the two sides basically battering away at each other without subtlety or finesse. Logic and even intelligence go out the window as characters are continually acting against basic common sense and self-preservation. Coincidence and serendipity are relied upon to get over the rough patches. The promise of a detailed examination of faith under siege, present in Richard's psychological situation, is left hanging.

To her credit, Snodgrass attempts to introduce some complexity into her main characters, as with Richard's sexual history and desires and his fraught relationship with his coldly perfectionist father. But there is an arbitrary feel to these and other personal characteristics; it's as though they were generated by some drab computer software. Richard and the rest don't have any kind of organic wholeness; they are amalgamations of disparate details that don't hang together very well. And neither does The Edge of Reason.