needs more demons?

I expected that limiting the length of a short story to 420 characters — as counted by Facebook’s software, spaces and punctuation included — would come off as a gimmick rather than an artistic constraint, but this collection of a hundred and fiftyish micro-stories is pretty amazing, in several dimensions.
The first thing I noticed [...]

[Read more →]

It’s a bit tricky to describe The Final Folly of Captain Dancy without sounding like I’m damning it with faint praise, so maybe I should say up front that I definitely enjoyed this enough to read more. Watt-Evan’s stories have a bit of an old-school vibe; it’s easy for me to imagine him as a [...]

[Read more →]

I read The Immorality Engine even though I didn’t think much of the first two novels in Mann’s “Newbury and Hobbes Investigations” series, of which this is the third. Somewhat to my surprise, I liked it better than the other two.
I still found the prose a bit repetitive and the plot low on surprises, but [...]

[Read more →]

The Inquisitor’s Apprentice is set in a vividly rendered alternate late-19th-century New York city. Magic exists in this world, but — officially, at least — it is controlled by wealthy industrialists like “J. P. Morgaunt,” a character inspired by J. P. Morgan (some more sympathetically rendered historical figures appear under their real names) . Thirteen [...]

[Read more →]

The second of Mann’s “Newbury and Hobbes” steampunk/mystery/adventures (following The Affinity Bridge) struck me as stronger overall than its predecessor, with a bit more depth of character. I found the tone a little inconsistent — there are a few moments that veer into excessively broad parody of pulp/adventure conventions and require a greater level [...]

[Read more →]

Soulless is set in a fantasy alternate Victorian era, with vampires and werewolves alongside airships and mysterious brass apparati. It deftly mashes the modern urban fantasy/paranormal romance into the Regency-style historical romance, adds a hefty dollop of whodunnit, and seasons it with steampunk atmosphere and a tiny dash of xenophobic horror.
I liked it [...]

[Read more →]

I was a little slow to warm to Proof by Seduction, mostly because of a familiar complaint with historical fiction: the characters seemed more like 21st-century people than 19th-century people. They pay lip service to the strictures of class and breeding, but they’re fundamentally not as beholden to them as Georgette Heyer’s characters, let alone [...]

[Read more →]

Harlot Charlotte finds herself catapulted from late 19th-century Denmark to 21st-century England in Liz Jensen’s odd fantasy. Charlotte is a mildly unreliable narrator somewhat given to giddiness and entirely given to elaborately structured sentences:
When Franz finally departed for a place he referred to mysteriously a the Halfway Club, I resolved to confront Professor Krak [...]

[Read more →]

I liked Harwood’s previous novel The Ghost Writer very much. The Séance shares several of The Ghost Writer’s hallmarks: reserved, chilly, almost 19th-century flavored prose*; dark, complex and secret-spiked family histories; an elaborate, almost meta-textual, structure with multiple layers of nested stories; a brooding, slow-growing aura of menace; and lingering questions about which — if [...]

[Read more →]

On the whole I liked Glen David Gold’s Sunnyside, even if I’m not quite sure what to make of it. It shares only superficial similarities with Gold’s debut novel, Carter Beats the Devil: like the earlier book it seamlessly blends historical and invented characters in a story fully of derring-do, heartbreak, and coincidence-fueled plot twists. [...]

[Read more →]