1992 fantasy, seventh in Saberhagen's loose Dracula series. A girl
has gone missing near the Grand Canyon, and it's nothing like that simple.
If A Matter of Taste reminded me of Thorn with its gritty
shenanigans, this book was more like Dominion: there's magic and
deep weirdness going on, and at least one place seems to have come
entirely unmoored from time.
Which in turn makes it a bit of a shame that there isn't more done
with it. There are two main narratives, a young man kidnapped from a
Civilian Conservation Camp work force in the 1930s and the missing
girl in the modern day, because flashbacks have become an important
part of the series, but the earlier one gets discarded without any
narrative conclusion, and there's never any question of mixing up
causality. The span of the location reaches back a million years, but
that leaves you still thoroughly in the Pleistocene, long after most
of the more interesting archaic animals have become extinct. There's
mention of the very early days of Earth, but to reach them you'd have
to go back thousands of times further than that. And bring air tanks.
(Also, the Grand Canyon is deeper in the past?)
It's a lovely set of ideas but it's being used for the same old tales
of obsession and dominance. At least this time the obsession isn't
over a woman, or for straightforward power. Private investigators do
their two-dimensional thing, without much effect, and Dracula is
effortlessly superior whenever he's on stage. (And this time he
doesn't even have an adversary to stop him succeeding at everything he
tries.)
I think this book would have been much better if Saberhagen had had
something to say.