Rushing the story too much

Harem books are a guilty pleasure. They're unrealistic fantasies - but there's good unrealistic fantasies and bad ones. Demon DIY is in between.

The premise works well enough: the main character is a successful realtor who hates his job. He'd much rather be fixing up a house, even a haunted one. But it's rushed through to get to the 'good' part - the main character decides to quit his job and take on a haunted house in the first chapter. His motivations for doing so are mentioned, but they're so briefly explored that they don't seem real. He simply decides to buy the place and move in with no real plan for how to survive after doing so. The main character soon builds a relationship with the three-and-a-half monster girls in the house, and the exploration of the girls and their personalities is well done. The voice actors are a treat here; I especially enjoyed the Irish accent and bad puns of the Dullahan.

There are two problems with the rest of the book. The first is that all the monster girls are weirdly passive. They don't always like the main character, but they seem powerless to resist him and accept him as the 'clan head' without any resistance. They also seem helpless to solve the problems they've faced for years that the MC fixes in days. The second problem is the harem aspect. Most books give you a reason, however flimsy, that the main character gets to have a harem of beauties. Demon DIY does, too...but only AFTER the main character has cheated on his girlfriend. He knew what he was doing - and that makes him an asshole, even if it later turns out his girlfriend was okay with it. It's hard to have sympathy for him after that.

I finished book one and enjoyed the girls and their voices, but not the plot or the main character. It's good value for your credit, and if you're a sucker for monster girls this may be the book for you! But it wasn't for me.

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