History Literature / DanielFaust

** Nicky Agnelli and the twins. Even when Nicky was deposed as the local TheDon and went on the run he made sure to leave Juliette and Justine enough money to live on in a clean back account.

* TrueCompanions: Daniel's crew.

* ImAHumanitarian: Anyone who wants to do business with Naavarasi has to dine with her first. Given that she's a rakshasi hunger-spirit who gleefully devours humans, the meat she serves probably didn't come from the local deli. (Then again, given her penchant for mind games, it just might have...)
** Caitlin has casually warned Daniel, twice, not to take meat from the red Tupperware in her refrigerator (because "he wouldn't like it").

** Meadow Brand, Lauren Carmichael's [[TheDragon right-hand woman]] is a remorseless murderer, and absolutely revels in it, killing people for little to no reason. She's also not big on loyalty; she turns on Lauren in ''Living End'' and helps Daniel kill her. It says something when Daniel deals with the actual powers of Hell but Meadow is by a wide margin the most sadistic person in the series.

The Daniel Faust series is five books long: ''The Long Way Down'', ''Redemption Song'', ''The Living End'',''A Plain-Dealing Villain'', and ''The Killing Floor Blues''. The first three books form a rough trilogy as Daniel stumbles on a "TheEndOfTheWorldAsWeKnowIt" plot and tries to take down the bad guys.

* BadassGay: Corman and Bentley, the guys who took Daniel in after he escaped from his father and who taught him everything he knows about magic.

* UtopiaJustifiesTheMeans: Lauren Carmichael and her crew [[spoiler: murdered the people they loved most in the world, seeking to open the Etruscan Box, believing it to be a demon that Lauren could control with the Ring of Solomon]].

* SevenDeadlySins: As noted in OurDemonsAreDifferent, demons are divided into seven different "Choirs" based on these. Caitlin and Prince Sitri are both Choir of Lust while Caitlin's friend Emma is Choir of Greed.

* AbusiveParents: Daniel's father was both an abusive alcoholic and an unmedicated schizophrenic who flew into a paranoid rage at the slightest provocation. Daniel occasionally wonders/worries how much of his father's madness is in his own blood.
** Which explains why seeing children get hurt is Daniel's rage trigger. At the beginning of The Long Way Down, it's mentioned that a previous target of his, a pedophile, is permanently institutionalized and [[AndIMustScream the doctors can't figure out why he shrieks in endless terror if he's not kept under heavy sedation]]. Likewise, when he's too late to save [[spoiler:Amber Vance from being sacrificed]], he tracks down [[spoiler:her father]] and [[spoiler:murders him in cold blood, kicking him off the edge of a skyscraper]].

* AuthorAppeal: Far, ''far'' too many BDSM allusions to be a coincidence. That and the fact that Caitlin and Emma are both sexually dominant, plus Naavarasi trying to put a slave collar around Daniel's throat...

* ColdBloodedTorture: Nicky Agnelli's preferred means of dealing with traitors. Justine and Juliette, his designated {{torture technician}}s, delightedly refer to the act as "our favorite game: attitude adjustment!"

* CoolCar: The Hemicuda. Enough said.
* CrapsackWorld: God is missing or dead, angels are genocidal, and the only reason the world isn't in Hell's hands is because the various demonic courts are too busy feuding with each other to really focus on us. Humanity is a guppy in a very big ocean filled with very hungry sharks.

* DealWithTheDevil: Demons of the Venerable Order of Bargainers turn this into an art form, and are basically Hell's rock stars ("except for the actual rock stars"). [[spoiler: Senator Alton Roth]] sold his soul to the bargainer Calypso for political power, and Daniel runs a short con involving a copy of his contract.

* DidYouJustFlipOffCthulhu: Daniel's phone call to Sullivan.

* OurDemonsAreDifferent: Demons are divided by Choirs of Sin, which influence their personality and powers. Caitlin, Choir of Lust, addicts [[spoiler:Carl Holt]] to her touch, while the Sloth demon in The Living End can leave a victim so lethargic that they'd rather [[spoiler:starve to death instead of getting out of bed]].

* PsychoForHire: Meadow Brand. Oh God, Meadow Brand.
** Also, Justine and Juliette. When a hit-team takes their aliases from a pair of novels by the Marquis de Sade, you know they're bad news.

* PublicDomainArtifact: The Ring of Solomon.

* UnwittingPawn: [[spoiler: Lauren to the Smoke-faced Men.]]

* HeroOfAnotherStory: Harmony Black is basically a classic urban fantasy heroine, veteran of many past adventures, squaring off against some evil bastards. WordOfGod says that she'll be the subject of her own spinoff series in the near future.

* AuthorTract: Subverted, in the character of the hopelessly corrupt Senator Alton Roth. At no point do we ever learn his political party, his views or his liberal/conservative slant, and when Pixie tries to discuss it, she's cut off before she can share any details.

* Badass: Narratively, the only way to prevent any stand-up fight with Daniel's crew from being an instant CurbStompBattle is to find some way to take Caitlin out of the picture or throw an equally powerful demon at her.

Daniel Faust is the [[AntiVillain anti-villain]] main character of a series by Craig Schaefer, author of the Literature/RevancheCycle. A con artist, thief and former gangster living in the shadows of Las Vegas, Faust uses black magic and bullets to get what he wants. He navigates a noirish world of [[BlackAndGrayMorality black and grey morality]] with the help of his [[TrueCompanions crew of grifters and rogues]] and his lover Caitlin, the ruthless enforcer for a prince of Hell.

The Daniel Faust series is five books long: ''The Long Way Down'', ''Redemption Song'', ''The Living End'',''A Plain-Dealing Villain'', and ''The Killing Floor Blues''. The first three books form a rough trilogy as Daniel stumbles on a TheEndOfTheWorldAsWeKnowIt plot and tries to take down the bad guys.

* ColdBloodedTorture: Nicky Agnelli's preferred means of dealing with traitors. Justine and Juliette, his designated [[TortureTechnician torture technicians]], delightedly refer to the act as "our favorite game: attitude adjustment!"

* NoKillLikeOverkill: [[spoiler:Alvin's]] death at Caitlin's hands. Also, [[spoiler:Sullivan's]] death at Caitlin's hands. Basically, anyone Caitlin kills.

* PrivateEyeMonologue: The whole series, with a heaping helping of [[FirstPersonSmartass First-Person Smartass]].

** Prince Sitri eats, sleeps and breathes this archetype. Anything he does is almost unquestionably part of a [[XanatosGambit Xanatos gambit]] five layers deep.

* UtopiaJustifiesTheMeans: Lauren Carmichael and her crew [[spoiler: murdered the people they loved most in the world, seeking to open the Etruscan Box, believing it to be a demon that Lauren could control with the Ring of Solomon.]]
* VillainousBreakdown: Sullivan, after [[spoiler:his cult abandons him and switches sides]] thanks to Melanie's [[TheReasonYouSuckSpeech The Reason You Suck Speech]].

The Daniel Faust series is four books long: ''The Long Way Down'', ''Redemption Song'', ''The Living End'' and ''A Plain-Dealing Villain''. The first three books form a rough trilogy as Daniel stumbles on a TheEndOfTheWorldAsWeKnowIt plot and tries to take down the bad guys.

* HeroOfAnotherStory: Harmony Black is basically a classic urban fantasy heroine, veteran of many past adventures, squaring off against some evil bastards. Too bad for her, ''this'' series is about the evil bastards.

Daniel Faust is the [[AntiVillain anti-villain]] main character of a series by Craig Schaefer. A con artist, thief and former gangster living in the shadows of Las Vegas, Faust uses black magic and bullets to get what he wants. He navigates a noirish world of [[BlackAndGrayMorality black and grey morality]] with the help of his [[TrueCompanions crew of grifters and rogues]] and his lover Caitlin, the ruthless enforcer for a prince of Hell.

* HalfHumanHybrid: Cambion are children born from a union (usually via rape) of a demon and a human. Nicky Agnelli is a Cambion, as are his sisters, Justine and Josephine.

* HeroAntagonist: Harmony Black.

* WellIntentionedExtremist: Lauren Carmichael.

* Masquerade: Big time. The magicians of the world -- who tend, more often than not, to be career criminals -- have a collective agreement to keep things quiet. Breaching that agreement is a good way to get a curb-stomping or a bullet in your head.

** '''Daniel:''' She killed a friend of mine. He was family. Not by blood, by bond. Where I come from, if somebody hurts a member of your family, you put them in the ground. No mercy, no forgiveness, no second chances. [[spoiler:Lauren]] signed her own death warrant.

* XanatosGambit: The entire plot of Redemption Song. Once Sitri starts his game, there's literally no choice Daniel can make that doesn't further his plans, one way or another.
** In the epilogue, the revelation that [[spoiler: Father Alvarez]] was [[spoiler:Pinfeather all along]] just drives this home. Sitri obviously knew his true identity the whole time. [[spoiler: So even if Daniel did the most unlikely thing possible -- obeying Sitri's order to kill the priest -- he ''still'' would have helped Sitri out.]]

The Daniel Faust series is three books long: ''The Long Way Down'', ''Redemption Song'', and ''The Living End''. [[WordOfGod Word of God]] says that the fourth book, ''A Plain-Dealing Villain'', will be out in early 2015.

* HeroOfAnotherStory: Harmony Black is basically a classic urban fantasy heroine, veteran of many past adventures, squaring off aganist some evil bastards. Too bad for her, ''this'' series is about the evil bastards.

** Doing [[ForTheEvulz evil for evil's sake]] is a pretty low priority for demonkind, at least the ones we've met so far. They're either out to satisfy their own ambitions (Nicky and Sullivan) or operatives in the endless cold war between Hell's feuding courts (Caitlin and Emma). They can be polite and even friendly -- as long as they're getting what they want. Stand in their way, though, and the politeness vanishes in the blink of an eye.

* MagnificentBastard: Prince Sitri. He eats [[XanatosGambit Xanatos gambits]] for breakfast, and he's so slick that when he gets bored, he orchestrates assassination attempts against ''himself''. At the end of Redemption Song he was willing to [[spoiler: send Daniel away with the Ring of Solomon and set him up as humanity's champion]] just so he'd have someone interesting to fight.

** To a lesser extent, Nicky Agnelli. He's untouchable by human ''or'' infernal law, to the extent that he [[spoiler: manipulates Lauren Carmichael into enslaving Caitlin, tosses Daniel to a pack of feral cambion, and tries to pull off a coup against Prince Sitri]] and essentially ''gets off with a warning''.

** Daniel has his moments of magnificent bastardry, usually just after [[OutGambitted out-gambitting]] his enemies.

* NauseaFuel: Lauren and her snakes. And where she puts those snakes.

** What little we see of Alvin Schenkel's porn flicks qualifies. It's not hard to imagine what turned Daniel's stomach, though thankfully the author doesn't spell it out.

''"You were right about one thing. See, I fooled myself. Thought I was some crusading hero for a while there. But that's not who I am at all, is it? I'm the bad guy."''
-- '''Daniel Faust''', ''The Long Way Down''