Book Burners

This is a collaboratively written fantasy by Max Gladstone, Margaret Dunlap, Mur Lafferty, and Brian Francis Slattery. It was originally published as an online serial, sort of a version of the Charles Dickens approach; this book is the complete Season 1 and apparently there are 2 more seasons.  I was intrigued not only by the title, but also by having recently read Mur Lafferty's Six Wakes. As a collaborative effort I would say it was fairly successful, in that the tone of the writing seemed consistent, the characters developed in chunks depending on the "episode," of which there were 16, averaging 50 pages in length, and they carried ideas from one author's section to the next with little dysjunction. That being said, it was a LONG book and seemed to drag at times. It often felt like the authors were trying to each come up with the goriest situations for the protagonists to deal with rather than moving the main plot line forward. This makes sense when you think that the goal is to keep readers/ listeners coming back for a new online episode each week.
The main plot line is that NYPD detective Sal Brooks has a younger brother, Perry, who seeks out arcane materials and gets in over his head, becoming possessed by a particularly powerful demon called The Hand. When a team arrives from the Vatican's Societas Librorum Occultorum, charged with keeping the world safe from evil magic, Sal gets drafted to help them. She wants to find The Hand and retrieve her brother's soul, but the world seems to be plagued by increasingly frequent outbreaks of magic, perhaps due to the quest of Alex Norse to find and possess the "Norton Anthology of Demons" as Sal calls it, aka the Codex Umbra, a book in which the really bad demons were imprisoned centuries ago by the Knights of St. John. The other team members are a priest, Father Arturo Menchu, the Vatican's Black Archives librarian, Asanti, a formerly demon possessed computer guru, Liam, and Grace, a woman still possessed by magic who is conscious and aging only when a certain candle is burning. The relationships between team members are reasonably believable as is the political infighting among the Societas' three teams and between Team Three (Sal et al.'s team) and the Vatican hierarchy. Is there any good magic as Asanti claims, or is it all bad, as Father Menchu believes? Mixed review from me for putting this in book form.