Book Review | The Kind Folk by Ramsey Campbell

Luke Arnold is a successful stage comedian who, with his partner Sophie Drew, is about to have their first child. Their life seems ideal and Luke feels that true happiness is finally within his grasp.

This wasn't always the case. Growing up in a loving but dysfunctional family, Luke was a lonely little boy who never felt that he belonged. While his parents adored him, the whole family knew that due to a mix-up at the hospital, Luke wasn't their biological child. His parents did the best they could to make the lad feel special. But it was his beloved uncle Terence who Luke felt most close to, a man who enchanted (and frightened) the lad with tales of the other—eldritch beings, hedge folks, and other fables of Celtic myth.

When Terence dies in a freak accident, Luke suddenly begins to learn how little he really knew his uncle. How serious was Terence about the magic in his tales? Why did he travel so widely by himself after Luke was born, and what was he looking for? Soon Luke will have to confront forces that may be older than the world in order to save his unborn child.

***

In everything we do, every decision we make and every action we undertake, our identities define us... yet we never really know who we are. We know who we were—we tell ourselves we do, to be sure—but like all memories, these recollections lose their sharpness with time, and, invariably, some of their truth, too. And while we think we know who we will be, these are projections at best; messy guesses subject to sudden and surprising changes in circumstance.

Take Luke Arnold, the central perspective of The Kind Folk by Ramsey Campbell. He thought he was the only son of Maurice and Freda Arnold, but as a DNA test taken on television demonstrates, he's not; the hospital must have given the couple he calls mum and dad the wrong baby. "He still has all his memories; nothing has changed them or what he is, let alone the people who are still his parents in surely every way that counts." (p.19) Nevertheless, this sensational revelation alters Luke's perception of his past, and that, in turn, has huge ramifications on his future.

Who, then, is the man caught in the middle?

Not who—or what—you might imagine, actually...

A father-to-be, in the first, because Luke's wife, the singer/songwriter Sophie Drew, is expecting. And although the doctors at the hospital give clean bills of health to both of the prospective parents, they take Luke to one side to say that it would be "in the interest of your child to discover what you can about your origins." (p.73) Origins that, try as he might to divine them in the subsequent months, don't seem to be entirely natural in nature.

It just so happens he already has an inkling as to where else he could conceivably have come from, because as a boy, he was haunted by bad dreams, imaginary companions and a compulsion to twist the fingers of his hands into shapes seen by some as satanic. The child psychologist little Luke saw all those years ago thought this was the fault of Luke's beloved uncle, Terence, and his tales of the Kind Folk.

Book Review | Sherlock Holmes and the Servants of Hell by Paul Kane

Late 1895. Sherlock Holmes and his faithful companion Dr John Watson are called upon to investigate a missing persons case. On the face of it, this seems like a mystery that Holmes might relish, as the person in question vanished from a locked room. But this is just the start of an investigation that will draw the pair into contact with a shadowy organisation talked about in whispers, known only as the Order of the Gash.

As more people go missing in a similar fashion, the clues point to a sinister asylum in France and to the underworld of London. However, it is an altogether different underworld that Holmes will soon discover—as he comes face to face not only with those followers who do the Order’s bidding on Earth, but those who serve it in Hell: the Cenobites.

***

The great detective applies his inimitable intellect to a murder mystery like none other in Sherlock Holmes and the Servants of Hell, a surprisingly credible commingling of Arthur Conan Doyle's classic characters and the soul-shredding subjects of The Scarlet Gospels. That's right, readers: Clive Barker's Cenobites are back—and they may actually have met their match.

Holmes himself has seen better days, I dare say. In the wake of the great hiatus, during which period he disappeared to mess with his nemesis, he's alive and relatively well, but without the dastardly Moriarty to match wits with, he's grown a bit bored. And as Dr Watson warns:

When Holmes grew bored, it was usually only a matter of time before he took up his old habit of drug use [...] however his penchant for his seven-percent solution of cocaine, administered via a needle he kept locked away in a polished Morocco box, was the least of my concerns after he returned, it transpired.

The black dog of Holmes' habit is troubling, to be sure, but still more worrisome to Watson is the fact that his closest acquaintance's "malaise was gaining momentum." Said detective is dismissing fascinating cases with no explanation and plying his elementary trade in plague-ridden areas. "If these were in fact efforts to feel something, to feel alive," Watson worries, "then they might well kill the man instead."

It's a relief, then, that "this dangerous road he was heading down: this terrible testing of himself" seems to cease when a couple come knocking on the door of 221B Baker Street. Laurence Cotton's brother Francis has gone missing, is the thing, and the police aren't taking his disappearance seriously—despite the screams the housekeeper heard emerge from the loft he was last seen locking.

At the scene of the could-be crime, our chums uncover a void in the decades-old dust that suggests the involvement of a small box, and soon scent "an odd smell of vanilla" masking an undercurrent of what must be blood. From just this, Holmes is convinced that Francis has fallen victim to some dark deed indeed, but the mechanics of his murder are mysterious—as is the motive of the killer or killers—and that comes to fascinate a fellow famed for his ability to explain anything.

Book Review | A Borrowed Man by Gene Wolfe

It is perhaps a hundred years in the future, our civilization is gone, and another is in place in North America, but it retains many familiar things and structures. Although the population is now small, there is advanced technology, there are robots, and there are clones.

E. A. Smithe is a borrowed person. He is a clone who lives on a third-tier shelf in a public library, and his personality is an uploaded recording of a deceased mystery writer. Smithe is a piece of property, not a legal human.

A wealthy patron, Colette Coldbrook, takes him from the library because he is the surviving personality of the author of Murder on Mars. A physical copy of that book was in the possession of her murdered father, and it contains an important secret, the key to immense family wealth. It is lost, and Colette is afraid of the police. She borrows Smithe to help her find the book and to find out what the secret is. And then the plot gets complicated.

***

Gene Wolfe continues to play with the nature of narrators in his mostly notional new novel, a middling murder mystery explicated from the perspective of a posthumous author pretending to be a detective.

The story starts with Colette Coldbrook: sweetheart teacher, well-spoken socialite and, in the early parts of the narrative, something of a survivor. A year or so ago, she suddenly lost her mother; a little later, her father suffered a suspicious heart attack; and in the aftermath of that latter's passing, her beloved brother was straight-up strangled. She has no-one to turn to, now, and so many questions—not least about the unassuming book Conrad Coldbrook Junior found in Conrad Coldbrook Senior's safe.

Colette believes—with good reason, even—that Murder on Mars may be the key to understanding what happened to her family, and perhaps why, but beyond that, she doesn't have a clue what to do. The thought of reading this fictional fossil doesn't cross her ultra-modern mind for a minute. Instead, she does the other obvious thing: she rents out a so-called "reclone" of the author of the novel, E. A. Smithe, from her local library, and asks him to do the dirty work.

Now it might be that Smithe comes complete with most of his long-dead predecessor's memories, but he doesn't remember much about Murder on Mars—and to make matters worse, he's a copy of a crime writer rather than anything resembling a detective himself:

I was not the man I thought I was, the one whose name I used—whose name I still use right now, for that matter. I was somebody else, a kid who had been grown from that guy's DNA and loaded up with his memories, phony memories of things that never happened to me and never could happen to me. (p.36)

Thus, the investigation into the curious case of the Coldbrooks proceeds in frustrating fits and stuttering starts, regularly interrupted by Smithe's soul-searching and set back substantially when Colette is (apparently) kidnapped. "The more I thought about it the surer I got that there was something funny going on, but I could not even guess what it was." (p.106)

Book Review | Something Coming Through by Paul McAuley

The Jackaroo have given humanity 15 worlds and the means to reach them. They're a chance to start over, but they're also littered with ruins and artifacts left by the Jackaroo's previous clients. Miracles that could reverse the damage caused by war, climate change, and rising sea levels. Nightmares that could forever alter humanity—or even destroy it.

Chloe Millar works in London, mapping changes caused by imported scraps of alien technology. When she stumbles across a pair of orphaned kids possessed by an ancient ghost, she must decide whether to help them or to hand them over to the authorities. Authorities who believe that their visions point towards a new kind of danger.

And on one of the Jackaroo's gift-worlds, the murder of a man who has just arrived from Earth leads policeman Vic Gayle to a war between rival gangs over possession of a remote excavation site.

Something is coming through. Something linked to the visions of Chloe's orphans, and Vic Gayle's murder investigation. Something that will challenge the limits of the Jackaroo's benevolence...

***

Spinning off a series of experimental short stories, Something Coming Through marks the actual factual start of what's been called "an extraordinary new project" by Paul McAuley, the award-winning author of The Quiet War novels. As a beginning, it's inordinately promising, largely because the world is so wide and relevant and well-developed, and though the characters are a little lacking, Something Coming Through satisfies as a standalone story too.

Allow me to introduce you to the Jackaroo, an advanced race of aliens whose near-as-dammit divine intervention in human history may well have saved us—from ourselves:

Just before the Jackaroo had made contact [...] every country in the world had been caught up in riots, revolutions and counter-revolutions, civil wars, border wars, water wars, net wars, and plain old-fashioned conflicts, mixed up with climate change and various degrees of financial collapse. All this craziness culminating in a limited nuclear missile exchange and a string of low-yield tactical nukes exploding in capital cities. The Spasm.

The Spasm has a special place in Chloe Millar's heart:

The Trafalgar Square bomb had [...] obliterated a square kilometre of central London, igniting enormous fires and injuring over ten thousand people and killing four thousand. Including Chloe's mother, who had been working at the archives of the National Portrait Gallery—research for a book on Victorian photography—and had vanished in an instant of light brighter and hotter than the surface of the sun. 

Chloe had been twelve when the bomb had exploded her world, had just turned thirteen when the Jackaroo revealed themselves and told everyone in the world that they wanted to help.

The aliens arrived in the nick of time, natch, and their assistance really did make a difference. There are still tensions, yes, and crimes continue to be committed—more on those in a moment—but given free reign over fifteen so-called "gift-worlds" and the technology to travel to them, albeit under strict supervision, people have room to breathe again; space to expand independently; and time to consider a lot of things—not least the lilies.

But why did the Jackaroo come to Earth in the first? What intergalactic game are they playing, and what cost their kindness?

Book Review | Retribution by Mark Charan Newton

 

Having just solved a difficult case in his home city of Tryum, Sun Chamber Officer Lucan Drakenfeld and his associate Leana are ordered to journey to the exotic city of Kuvash in Koton, where a revered priest has gone missing. When they arrive, they discover the priest has already been found—or at least parts of him have.

But investigating the unusual death isn't a priority for the legislature of Kuvash; there's a kingdom to run, a census to create and a dictatorial Queen to placate. Soon Drakenfeld finds that he is suddenly in charge of an investigation in a strange city, whose customs and politics are as complex as they are dangerous.

Kuvash is a city of contradictions; wealth and poverty exist uneasily side-by-side and behind the rich façades of gilded streets and buildings, all levels of depravity and decadence are practised.

When several more bodies are discovered mutilated and dumped in a public place, Drakenfeld realizes there's a killer at work who seems to delight in torture and pain. With no motive, no leads and no suspects, he feels like he's running out of options. And in a city where nothing is as it seems, seeking the truth is likely to get him killed...

***

The laid-back detective drama of Drakenfeld marked a propitious departure for Mark Charan Newton: an assured move from the weird and sometimes wonderful fantasy with which he had made his name to a tale of mystery and alt-history not dissimilar to C. J. Sansom's Shardlake stories.

But with all-out war in the offing—in large part because of Drakenfeld's discoveries at the end of the text so titled—and a serial killer torturing and slaughtering some of most prominent people in the kingdom of Koton, the darkness of the Legends of the Red Sun series is back; a change of pace Newton paves the way for on the first page of his new book.

"In over thirty years of life, a decade of which has been spent as an Officer of the Sun Chamber," Lucan Drakenfeld remarks, "the world has long since robbed me of my limitless optimism." (p.1) To be sure, he appears a pretty positive protagonist compared to grimdark Princes like this year's Jalan and Yarvi, yet the events of Retribution are still to take their toll—on its hero and, indeed, its reader.

Book Review | Moriarty by Anthony Horowitz

Sherlock Holmes is dead.

Days after Holmes and his arch-enemy Moriarty fall to their doom at the Reichenbach Falls, Pinkerton agent Frederick Chase arrives in Europe from New York. The death of Moriarty has created a poisonous vacuum which has been swiftly filled by a fiendish new criminal mastermind who has risen to take his place.

Ably assisted by Inspector Athelney Jones of Scotland Yard, a devoted student of Holmes's methods of investigation and deduction, Frederick Chase must forge a path through the darkest corners of the capital to shine light on this shadowy figure, a man much feared but seldom seen, a man determined to engulf London in a tide of murder and menace.

The game is afoot...

***

The great detective and his greatest enemy are dead—or so it is said.

"After the confrontation that the world has come to know as 'The Final Problem,' [though] there was nothing final about it, as we now know," (p.4) Sherlock Holmes and Professor Moriarty have absented their respective roles, each for his own secretive reasons. So what's Scotland Yard to do when London is rocked by a series of crimes so indescribably violent that they rival the Ripper's?

Why, hand over Holmes' role to Inspector Athelney Jones: a man, you might remember, much maligned by Dr Watson's depiction of him as a total dolt in 'The Sign of the Four.' Since then, however, Jones has "read everything that Mr Holmes has ever written. He has studied his methods and replicated his experiments. He has consulted with every inspector who ever worked with him. He has, in short, made Sherlock Holmes the very paradigm of his own life." (p.146)

And in our narrator, Frederick Chase—apparently the pick of Pinkerton's Detective Agency—Jones' Holmes has his Watson.

Book Review | The Forever Watch by David Ramirez

The Noah: a city-sized ship, half-way through an eight-hundred-year voyage to another planet. In a world where deeds, and even thoughts, cannot be kept secret, a man is murdered; his body so ruined that his identity must be established from DNA evidence. Within hours, all trace of the crime is swept away, hidden as though it never happened.

Hana Dempsey, a mid-level bureaucrat genetically modified to use the Noah's telepathic internet, begins to investigate. Her search for the truth will uncover the impossible: a serial killer who has been operating on board for a lifetime... if not longer.

And behind the killer lies a conspiracy centuries in the making.

***

No one on the Noah knows how or why or when the Earth went to hell—only that it did, and if humanity is to stand the slightest chance of surviving, the monolithic generation ship that these several thousands souls call home for the moment must succeed in its ambitious mission: to populate the planet Canaan.

In the interim, mimicry:

Look up at the fake sky with its fake moon and fake stars. Beyond the skyline of the tall crystal towers of Edo Section is a horizon. It is how the night might look back on Earth if it were not just a blasted wasteland, with a toxic atmosphere too thick for light to penetrate, and no one and nothing left alive to see it. Almost always a gentle breeze goes through the city, generated by carefully designed ventilation ducts behind the simulated sky, interacting with thermal radiation from the warmer street level. There are seasons too in the Habitat, also patterned after Earth. 

The Noah has days and nights because humans evolved with all these things, with a sun, with a moon and stars, with weather and seasons, and biologically, we do not do so well without all these environmental signals related to the passage of time. (pp.12-13)

Even the best laid plans have a habit of unravelling, however, and 800 years yet from its eventual destination, unrest in on the rise aboard the Noah.

City planner Hana Dempsey has been out of it for a bit at the beginning of David Ramirez's dizzying debut—on breeding duty, which every man and woman must do. But after nine months of deep sleep she comes to, feeling blue. Preoccupied by the fate of her baby, taken from her before before she awakened, Hana struggles to do her job properly, and her high-flying friends are hardly helpful. Instead, she seeks solace in the arms of a wolfman by the name of Barrens: a sensitive detective who has been there for her before, never mind his animal inclinations.

But Barrens has his obsessions as well, and as the relationship between he and Hana deepens, the pair share their secrets. She wants to know what happened to the child she took to term, while he is haunted by thoughts of his former boss, the remains of whose body Barrens saw.

Considering that Callahan's terrible death is on the record as a Retirement, he hasn't informed management of what he witnessed, for fear having his memories manipulated. He hasn't given up, however; he hopes his imminent transfer to Long Term Investigations will free him up to investigate the Callahan case, but the answers he happens upon only beg bigger questions.

In time, "a terrible pattern can be discerned. People are being erased from the system. As if they had never been born. Others have had their files modified, evidence of falsified Retirement." (p.45) It becomes clear that there's a murderer aboard the Noah—Mincemeat, our couple christen him, or her, or it—or perhaps a cabal of killers, because, quite impossibly, these deaths seem to have been happening for hundreds of years.

Book Review | Drakenfeld by Mark Charan Newton

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The monarchies of the Royal Vispasian Union have been bound together for two hundred years by laws maintained and enforced by the powerful Sun Chamber. As a result, nations have flourished but corruption, deprivation and murder will always find a way to thrive...

Receiving news of his father’s death, Sun Chamber Officer Lucan Drakenfeld is recalled home to the ancient city of Tryum and rapidly embroiled in a mystifying case. The King’s sister has been found brutally murdered, her beaten and bloody body discovered in a locked temple. With rumours of dark spirits and political assassination, Drakenfeld has his work cut out for him trying to separate superstition from certainty. His determination to find the killer quickly makes him a target as the underworld gangs of Tryum focus on this new threat to their power.

Embarking on the biggest and most complex investigation of his career, Drakenfeld soon realises the evidence is leading him towards a motive that could ultimately bring darkness to the whole continent. The fate of the nations is in his hands.

***

Once upon a time, fantasy was fun.

It still has its moments, I suppose, but broadly speaking, these are fewer and farther between in 2013 than in previous years. Though I would argue that it is at or perhaps even past its peak, the mark of grimdark is now embossed upon the genre. Where we used to delight in dreams of dalliances with dragons, our nightmarish narratives now revel in death instead. Today's foremost fantasy tends to traffic in disgust and duplicity rather than the beauty and truth of its youth.

Mark Charan Newton's nostalgic new novel is immensely refreshing in that respect. The several evenings I spent reading it were so perfectly pleasant that I struggle to recall the last fantasy novel I felt such unabashed fondness for.

Don't mistake me: Drakenfeld has its darkness. Its plot revolves around the murder of a royal, and there are several other deaths as it progresses. We witness few of these firsthand, however. Instead we see the scenes of said crimes from a detached detective's perspective — a detective who definitely does not relish the more disturbed elements of his profession. In a nice nod, a number of Drakenfeld's friends ask after this aspect of his character; they wonder, in short, why he is so soft, as if an attraction to violence of the visceral variety should be the norm now.

"Whatever we plan, I'd prefer it if we could keep the killing to a minimum."

"As week a disposition as ever, eh, Drakenfeld?" Callimar chuckled and held his arms wide like a bargaining merchant. "We'll try. But sometimes a little blood is unavoidable." (p.377)

Sometimes, sure. And indeed, Newton's new book is not what you'd call bloodless. But violence, the author argues, isn't the answer to every question.

I say well said.

But we're getting ahead of ourselves. Who is this character in any case? Well, like his father before him, our protagonist Lucan Drakenfeld is an Officer of the Sun Chamber: an independent organisation which essentially polices the eight nations of Vispasia during an era of peace and prosperity. He and his companion Leana have been occupied on the continent for a period of years when a messenger alerts Drakenfeld to the fact that his father has died of an apparent heart attack.

So home he goes; back to Tryum, ostensibly to attend to Calludian's remaining affairs. Whilst there, though, Drakenfeld becomes convinced that there's more to his father's passing than meets the eye — and as he's considering this quandary, one of the most significant figures in the city is killed. As the only Officer of the Sun Chamber in the area, he's called to the scene immediately... which tells a tall tale if ever there was one, of a murder most mysterious:

"Let me summarise to be clear: around midnight, the king's sister Lacanta was found with her throat cut. The weapon is not here. None of her jewellery has been removed and she has — I will assume for now — not been tampered with. The temple was locked and sealed, and the key left in the door, on the inside. There's no other way into the temple unless one was a god; no way out, apart from through those doors." (pp.66-67)

Nothing about this killing is simple. Still, after a personal plea from the King, who very much misses his sister, Drakenfeld agrees to look into it. In time, his investigations will take him from one side of Tryum to the other, from the slums of poor Plutum to the opulence of Optryx, the rich district. Initially, everyone is a suspect, but eventually Drakenfeld determines that the crime could only have been committed by someone close to the King's sister. By one of the several senators in love with the lovely Lacanta, perhaps, or even — Polla forbid the thought — a member of the remaining Royal family.

If the stakes weren't already great, the longer Drakenfeld spends looking into the locked room mystery that is Lucanta's killing, the bigger the body count becomes. Furthermore, it soon becomes clear that the case could have knock-on consequences for every nation of Vispasia, because about the city there are mutterings "about foreigners, about borders, about the glories of old — and of military expansion." (p.114) There seems a real desire to go to war again — to take territory and glory by force, of course — and unseating someone senior, assuming someone senior needs unseating, is likely to rouse an increasingly republican rabble.

Our man can't afford to concern himself with that — a murderer is a murderer, whatever his or her standing in the public eye — but he will have to tread very carefully indeed. Which brings me to my key complaint about Drakenfeld: Drakenfeld himself. One the one hand, he's a convincing individual: by using his homecoming as an adult to neatly reframe his former feelings for his father and an old flame, Newton develops his character absolutely adequately. Alas, he also comes across as somewhat bumbling, hardly ever evidencing the insidious intelligence requisite for people in his position, such that one wonders how he ever became an Officer of the esteemed Sun Chamber.

That Drakenfeld and the persons of interest he interviews appear unaware of his failings makes this all the more frustrating:

Tomorrow was the Blood Races. Senator Veron had sent a message for me saying that he would meet me in the morning and walk me to the Stadium of Lentus; I realised this would give me the perfect chance to speak to the other senators who were intimate with Lacanta. I would have to think of subtle ways to press them. Certainly, they would fear being quizzed by the Sun Chamber, but I wanted them to think they were not under suspicion so they opened up. (p.268)

I'll only say that these "subtle ways" are hardly Columbo-calibre, yet almost every subject opens up as if they were being interviewed by the great detective himself.

Aside this dissonance, I enjoyed the novel an awful lot. I admired its restraint and appreciated its laid-back pace: it's a slow burner, sure, but when it catches alight, it does burn bright. And though I recall feeling crestfallen upon learning that Drakenfeld would be a mystery, mostly, I'm pleased (and not a little relieved) to report that the secondary world Newton sets said thread against allows for the author to build another of the brilliant cities that have helped make his fantasy fiction distinctive. Tryum's Roman-influenced architecture is splendid, all "colonnades, fountains, market gardens, statues [and] frescoes," (p.23) whilst its cluster of cultures recalls the vibrancy of Villjamur:

Preachers leered or chanted from the relative sanctuary of decorative archways, a dozen dialects rising to my ears, whilst passers-by lit incense to offer to small statues of their gods. The sheer variety of people in Tryum was mesmerising. From clothing to foods to the decorations on clay pots, one could always walk the length of the continent in a single street. (p.28)

Involving as all this is, Drakenfeld's speculative elements are essentially secondary to the murder mystery the novel revolves around; though they add depth and texture to the tale, they have no narrative impact. Which is not to suggest Newton's latest is lacking in that regard. Far from it. But be aware that this series seems more interested in the mundane in the final summation than the magical. Drakenfeld is apt to satisfy Falco fans as much or more than genre fiction devotees like me — and I had a pretty terrific time with it. Like as not, you'll find lots to like too.

***

Drakenfeld
by Mark Charan Newton

UK Publication: October 2013, Tor

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