2017 Lovecraftian horror. In 1920s London, ex-boxer Harry Stubbs is
employed to track down a mysterious thing. But it seems to be
leaving corpses in its wake.
When I reviewed Broken Meats, I said:
Stubbs is still largely in the dark as to what's going on until the
end, and he perhaps relies a bit heavily on being told things by
other people rather than finding them out himself, but that's the
sort of person he is; if he started to assemble clues and deduce
things, he'd be a different sort of character.
But now, having survived two previous excursions into the uncanny, he
is starting to assemble clues and deduce things, and he is a
different sort of character… while remaining the same person. It's
rather a neat trick, and a reward for series readers. (He's also being
gradually pushed further into the criminal world, which doesn't quite
suit him but he hasn't found a way out yet; that's an interesting
tension I'd like to see developed further.)
There is of course a continuing Lovecraftian influence, but as before
with Hambling what matters is the way that it's tied to real
mythologies, and real history; the Horniman Museum has an important
place in this story, and it's not just as a generic location where old
stuff is stored, but rather in a way that takes advantage of its
particular character and background. The leavings of Mathers and the
Golden Dawn play a substantial part too (as they tend to in
20th-century occultism at least up to the war, and sometimes beyond).
You can say "aha, aren't I clever, I've spotted that it's (creature
X)", but it's not going to be the same as Lovecraft's take on creature
X. Key points are shared, but there are rather more differences – and
of course it's without Lovecraft's assumption that anything unfamiliar
must necessarily be bad. (Though also, sensibly, without the
assumption that it must be good…)
The story does sometimes feel like a single strand of clues: we have
one lead, we follow it, the resolution is less than ideal but it
generates one more lead. Which is fine in a linear narrative, of
course, but I can't help also seeing this in terms of the Call of
Cthulhu adventure it could also be, and in that one would really want
a web of connections to follow, to make up for the ones that go wrong.
One could start here but some threads left in earlier books are picked
up again here and there's reward to be had from knowing what they're
about. Recommended.
A review copy was provided.
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