Guest Post | Gail Z. Martin Explains "Days of the Dead"

Today on The Speculative Scotsman, it's my pleasure to make warm and welcome the one and only Gail Z. Martin, author of any number of novels, not least two complete series, namely The Chronicles of the Necromancer and The Fallen Kings Cycle. She's also at work currently on two very different texts: Reign of Ash — the sequel to Ice Forged, which began The Ascendant Kingdoms Saga — and Deadly Curiosity, an urban fantasy novel based, as Gail explains below, on the bones of the short story she wrote for Solaris' Magic anthology.

She is, in short, an abominably busy sort, which is why it's such a treat for me to be participating in her annual Days of the Dead blog tour. Here, in fact, are a few words from the author on what has become a Halloween habit:

I’ve always thought this week is the best time of the year. Samhain, All Hallow’s Eve, Halloween, Dia De Los Muertos all in one week — what’s not to love? And since I write epic fantasy and urban fantasy with lots of supernatural happenings, ghosts, and magic, it just seemed like a good week to come out to play.  

This is the biggest year ever, with over 40 participating sites. I’m on blogs all over the world as a guest on a variety of topics, at least six sites are doing give-aways of several of my books, there are plenty of excerpts of my books and short stories as well as excerpts from some of my author friends. It’s all here.

That wasn't all she wrote, either. Gail also answered a couple of questions for me, about her work past, present and future, too.

***

Tell us a little about how you came to write Ice Forged.

I’d been playing with the idea of what if magic broke (as it nearly did in the Chronicles books), and what if we had a post-apocalyptic medieval world, and what if a world sent its convicts to the northern rim (instead of, in our world, Georgia or Australia)... and I had an idea of where I wanted to go.

I like stories that test the mettle of a character and reveal what he/she is made of. In Ice Forged, the main characters have lost everything when they were disgraced and sentenced to a harsh prison colony. When the magic dies and the Continent is destroyed in the war and the resulting apocalypse, the life they’ve made for themselves as colonists is jeopardized. The discovery that Blaine is the only one who can restore the magic set him and his friends on a dangerous journey that will pit them against powerful immortal enemies. The fate of their world rests in the hands of a group of convicts. Succeed, and they win not only their freedom, but the ability to shape the future of the world. Fail, and face the wrath of the gods knowing you have condemned your world to darkness.

What inspires you to write?

There are stories I want to read that no one else has written, which means it’s my job to tell them. That’s my strongest inspiration. I want to get to read the stories once I’m done!

Tell us a little about your upcoming books.

Here’s the recap for Reign of Ash, the second book in The Ascendant Kingdoms Saga and the sequel to Ice Forged (coming in April, 2014 from Orbit):

Disgraced lord Blaine McFadden returned from exile to restore magic after a mage war devastated his homeland of Donderath. The king is dead, the army is scattered, and the once-powerful kingdom has been reduced to chaos and rubble.  Blaine may be the only one who can bring back the magic, so it’s up to Blaine and his small group of ex-convicts to save the kingdom, but the price might be their lives.

Deadly Curiosities is something a little different for me. It’s an urban fantasy set in modern-day Charleston, South Carolina. Cassidy Kincaide is the proprietor of Trifles and Folly, an antique shop with a difference that continues a family tradition begun in 1670 — acquiring and neutralizing dangerous supernatural items. It’s the perfect job for Cassidy, whose psychic gift lets her touch an object and know its history. Together with her business partner Sorren, a 500 year-old vampire and former jewel thief, Cassidy makes it her business to get infernal objects off the market.The novel arose out of a short story I wrote for Solaris Books’ Magic anthology. I had created the world of the stories for several anthologies I’d been asked to participate in, and I also write new short stories for ebook with those characters. Solaris like the short story so much, they asked for a full novel!

***

Thanks, Gail, for stopping off at The Speculative Scotsman.

And the fun is far from done, because tomorrow, I'll be publishing the first in a series of exclusive excerpts taken from the author's next novel, Reign of Ash. Keep your peepers peeled, readers!

Book Review | House of Small Shadows by Adam Nevill

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Catherine's last job ended badly. Corporate bullying at a top television production company saw her fired and forced to leave London, but she was determined to get her life back.

A new job and now things look much brighter. Especially when a challenging new project presents itself: to catalogue the late M. H. Mason's wildly eccentric cache of antique dolls and puppets. Rarest of all, she'll get to examine his elaborate displays of posed, costumed and preserved animals, depicting scenes from World War I.

When Mason's elderly niece invites her to stay at the Red House itself, where she maintains the collection, Catherine can't believe her luck... until his niece exposes her to the dark message behind her uncle's 'Art'. Catherine tries to concentrate on the job, but M. H. Mason's damaged visions raise dark shadows from her own past. Shadows she'd hoped had finally been erased. Soon the barriers between reality, sanity and memory start to merge. And some truths seem too terrible to be real...

***

Abandoned by her biological parents at an early age before being adopted into a family that questioned her sanity, Catherine has had it hard from the first, and her life doesn't appear to have gotten a great deal easier in recent years.

At school, it was plain that she didn't play well with others, nevertheless Catherine became close to Alice, another social outcast. Together, they found sanctuary of sorts in and around the grounds of a derelict special education centre, but in the summer of 1981, it all went horribly wrong: Alice vanished. Another victim of the Pied Piper of Ellyll, according to the local newspapers.

Her body was never recovered; indeed, no trace of Alice is ever discovered. But months later something like her spirit makes contact with Catherine, who in her innocence tells everyone about her otherworldly encounter... leading to a long period of appointments with child psychologists.

Time passes, and Catherine finally meets a man. Mike: the love of her life. He, however, breaks Catherine's heart, and so she leaves her troubled childhood behind to turn over a new leaf in London, where she works for a top television production company with an interest in documenting ancient estates. Then one dark day, just as she had dared to dream she'd managed to make a clean break, she crosses a colleague, Tara, who makes it her continuing mission to turn Catherine's life into a living hell.

Defeated, she returns to Ellyll with her tail between her legs, and suddenly, things start looking up. Catherine's offered a job cataloguing art and antiques for auction. Meanwhile she and Mike are reunited, and against all the odds, they make a go of it on take two.

Here, at last, is where House of Small Shadows starts. All of the above information we find out through protracted flashback, or reminiscences extended to such an extent that Adam Nevill's new novel nearly gives way under their weight. Catherine's implausible past does finally factor into the narrative, I'll give House of Small Shadows that, but cumulatively, it's indisputably convoluted, and far from the best foot for the author to put forward first.

Thankfully Nevill's rendering of the Red House, where most of the text takes place, is much more successful than his heavy-handed central character:

Her first impression was of a building enraged at being disturbed, rearing up at the sight of her between the gate posts. Twin chimney breasts, one per wing, mimicked arms flung upwards to claw the air. Roofs scaled in Welsh slate and spiked with iron crests at their peaks bristled like hackles. 

All of the lines of the building pointed to the heavens. Two steep gables and the arch of every window beseeched the sky, as though the great house was a small cathedral indignant at its exile in rural Herefordshire. And despite over a century of rustication among uncultivated fields, the colour of its Accrington brick remained an angry red. (pp.1-2)

A fantastic opening chapter wherein Catherine approaches this brilliantly sinister building left me longing to return to the Red House's grounds, but rather than that, Nevill has us travel back to repeat the previous week. When at last we catch up, our protagonist has been dispatched to poke around the property of the late M. H. Mason: a noted taxidermist in his time whose work fell out of favour as attitudes towards his ghastly art altered. Since his death decades ago, his niece, Edith, has cared for his estate:

Even a perfectly conserved Victorian drawing room filled with preserved animals could not upstage the visage of Edith Mason in the flesh. So much powder clung to the woman's ancient face that the skin papered to the bony features looked bleached, and her tiny eyes were made ghastly by their red rims. The lips about the teeth were non-existent and the nose was a blade, the light seemed to pass through the side as if it were pure cartilage. It was a difficult face to look at and Catherine struggled to do so. (p.39)

The Red House is redolent of all sorts of awfulness — as are its surviving inhabitants, Edith and Maude; the latter being a mute maid who slips Catherine a note after her first inspection, to the effect that she should never ever return.

It's spoiling nothing to say she does. But first, Nevill treats us to another chapter in the ongoing saga of Catherine's luckless life. With next to no explanation, Mike breaks up with her again, and she promptly falls into an intense depression, all alcohol and paranoia. Her only hope is to push through this bleary period and finish the work she's started at the Red House. To succeed in just this one way; that's all she wants. "Weirdness," in any event, "went with the territory. And this was her find, her moment. An opportunity. Not a trial that she could run away from like London and university and school and her hometown, and everyone that she ever encountered in any of those places." (p.186)

So she swallows her horror at the prospect and returns, against Maude's orders, to the Red House, resolving to complete a catalogue of M. H. Mason's disconcerting dolls and disgusting dead animals as quickly as possible. Whether she'll live to leave again is unclear...

For a book so rooted in its protagonist's past, at the first and at the last, it's a real shame House of Small Shadows revolves around such an unconvincing character. Catherine seems to have a single setting — hysterical — and though her horrid history is an influence in this, the unremitting misery and melodrama of her perspective distanced this reader rather than engendering my empathy. To make matters worse, she has next to no agency over the narrative. "Like a doll; something to be positioned by the insistent and capricious will of a nasty little girl," (p.99) she simply does as instructed, even when it's evident that the individuals instructing her mean her harm.

In recent years, Adam Nevill's novels have been a bastion of dark fantasy in the field of British genre fiction, and indeed, many of the ideas here are as insidious and effective as anything he's portrayed previously. The taxidermy will turn your stomach; the dolls are unspeakably unsettling; the Red House itself is an oppressive setting, and the lost old souls who call it home only add to that atmosphere. Take it from me: reading House of Small Shadows late in the evening is likely to lead to some serious nightmares.

As a narrative, then, there's a lot to recommend House of Small Shadows to horror aficionados. Character is where it all but falls apart, I fear. Your mileage may vary, but I had a tough time caring about Catherine, so though the novel's concepts and conflicts remained intellectually interesting to me right through to the satisfying, if unsurprising finale, and I admired in the meantime many aspects of the author's craft — including but not limited to his plot and premise — I wasn't emotionally involved in the experience at all, and that robbed my reading of House of Small Shadows of something indescribably vital.

***

House of Small Shadows
by Adam Nevill

UK Publication: October 2013, Pan

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Recommended and Related Reading

Giving the Game Away | Meet the Mouse Deer

I may have failed to mention that I spent the last ten days in Bremen, Germany. Long story short: I had a wonderful week in an incredibly pretty city, but Belgian beer still has the edge over the many and various German varieties I tried.

I'm home again in any event, and wishing I'd done a little more work while I was away... but hey, there's still time for a quick one today!

Yesterday I ran my review of The Mouse Deer Kingdom by Chiew-Siah Tei, "a beautiful little book [...] about outsiders in a land that seems set on smiting them," and this afternoon, thanks to the fine folks at Picador, I have three copies of the new novel to give away to entrants based in the UK.

All you need to do to stand a chance of winning one is email the answer to this quick question to thespeculativescotsman [at] googlemail [dot] com:

What was Cheiw-Siah Tei's multiple

award-nominated first novel called?

Mark your subject header 'Meet the Mouse Deer' and include your name and address in the text of the message. I'll announce the winners next week, when I'm well and truly on top of the blog again.

For the time being, toodles!

Book Review | The Mouse Deer Kingdom by Chiew-Siah Tei

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Amazon.co.uk / The Book Depository

Or get the Kindle edition

The year is 1905 and Chai Mingzhi, an immigrant newly arrived in the port-town of Malacca, takes Engi, an indigenous boy from the tropical forest, to live with him. Trapped in a realm he doesn’t recognize and finding himself caught up in Chai Mingzhi’s bitter personal affairs, Engi quickly learns to take on the shape of the legendary mouse deer in order to survive in the outside world.

Twenty years later, Engi sets out to unravel the mystery surrounding Chai’s past, his tireless quest for the land where the grand Minang Villa is built, and the tragedy that destroyed him.

The Mouse Deer Kingdom is a tale of love and betrayal against the backdrop of a troubled time when hundreds of thousands of Chinese fled poverty and the Qing Empire for Southeast Asia, where their arrival unsettled native life in their new home.

***

Home is where the heart is, so if you have no home, what happens to your heart?

This is a question Chai Mingzhi will ask himself again and again over the course of the nearly forty years The Mouse Deer Kingdom chronicles. "A run-away official from the Qing Court, which had supported the anti-foreigner rebels" (p.17) during the turn-of-the-century Boxer Rebellion, Chai uses the last tatters of his imperial influence to help his family and closest friends escape to the Malay Peninsula.

At the outset of Chiew-Siah Tei's long-awaited second novel, the travellers trade everything that is theirs to pay for passage on Captain Cochrane's cargo ship, but nothing in Chai's life comes easily, and the journey to Malacca is no exception. As gathering storms lay waste to a vessel never intended to carry passengers, we have, however, an opportunity to meet the Mingzhis.

There's Meilian: a well-to-do second wife, once, before being abandoned by her heartless husband and his hateful father. Left to rot, in short... but she did not. Instead, Meilian and her dear daughter were welcomed back into Chai's foundling family, and though they still struggle, both have new hope for the future. Little Jiaxi fantasises about it, in fact:

Anything was possible in English tales (a frog could become a prince, a maid a princess), anything could be realised in the English-speaking far-off lands, she conjectured, silently harbouring the fantasy. Was that the reason Uncle Mingzhi insisted she should acquire the knowledge? So that she would have aspirations like his? Her mother's descriptions of a determined, diligent brother who worked his way up to shrug off their grandfather's grasp [...] had always fascinated her. The man who became a mandarin at twenty-one was a legend, her hero. (pp.39-40)

Meilian, meanwhile, has attracted another's eye. She and Chai's foreign friend Martin are to be married, in fact. A young British businessman whose know-how helped her benevolent brother through a difficult time, Martin is unfortunately at odds with Chai's other companion, Tiansheng.

A former opera apprentice, "sold to the Northern Opera Troupe as a child by his starving parents," (p.25) Tiansheng was disinherited again because of his formative friendship with Chai, then the heir to a mighty landlord. In the dark days afterward, he murdered a man. Only Chai has stood by him since.

Chai, for his part, "kept only to himself, staying away from his past, the place, the people; their stories were never recounted." (p.221) But though he's put a pin in the past, filed it away for future reference, the present is ever uncertain.

The trip with which the book begins is terrifying, but Chai and his family make it to Malacca at least in one piece. There, they move into a haunted house-on-stilts that the locals want nothing to do with, promising to "find a proper place soon." (p.54) But they do not. They are not wanted in the village, nor would the wilderness welcome them, so they make the most of this ramshackle shelter, turning it into a place they might take pride in with their own spit and sweat. "The way things progressed seemed natural, inevitable," (p.58) such that some months later, the Mingzhi massive are almost happy here.

Could it really be so easy?

I'm afraid not, no. Because one day, their home away from home is taken from them too. The house-on-stilts is burned to the ground by someone with a grudge, and a member of the family dies in the fire, searching hopelessly for the nugget of gold that was to pay for their future.

Torn apart by this tragedy, the survivors go their separate ways after the fire — though Chai stays, vowing that this land the locals will not allow him will be his one day, come what may. He and Tiansheng soon begin a business, with Chai pocketing his part of the profits to invest in an enterprise that will bring him riches. Riches enough to buy back the charred parcel where he lost the one he loved.

Playing this long game leads to loneliness, of course. Chai and his childhood friend become distant and distrustful of one another, thus the former adopts a child from the forest — not as a slave, but as a son of sorts. This is Engi, a boy who becomes a mouse deer of a man, at once quick and cunning, and it is he, as it happens, who narrates the entire tale.

I was born in the forest, so was my father. As was my father's father, and his father. How many forefathers were there before them when the first took his place on the land? That I'm not able to count, but Father told me: 

"It began from the day the world started. When the sun and the moon began to take their turns in the sky, and birds emerged from the horizon, flapping their wings, singing. When the soil spread over the barren land, and green trees and red flowers, animals and snakes, beetles and butterflies rose from the earth and found their territories. Then the land opened up, became a river, and fish and prawns squeezed themselves out from the riverbed and swam freely in the water. [...] There wasn't an outside world during those early days, there was only Our World, the forest that was, and the forest was everything on this land." (pp.2-3)

The Mouse Deer Kingdom is mostly Mingzhi's story, yet Engi attempts, albeit inexpertly, to enmesh his narrative with another's:

I'll let him surface, Parameswara; I'll let him punctuate episodes of the Chinaman's life. On my exercise book, two lines are drawn — one of Chai Mingzhi's life in the early twentieth century; the other, Parameswara's, from the late fourteenth century — with a five-hundred-year gap between them. Only by comparing the similarities between their journeys will the differences in the outcomes appear stark. (pp.8-9)

This is a stretch too far, sadly. The similarities between the pair are unsubtly stressed, and the differences add precious little to the larger narrative. It's a relief, then, that Parameswara's part dead-ends abruptly, just a hundred pages in. As does another potentially fascinating narrative, namely Jiaxi's:

It'd been exhausting, the many roles she played. Like a chameleon, she draped on immaculately tailored skins for the right occasions to perfect her performance, switching seamlessly between a model student, a good team player in the sport field, a patient friend to ignorant school girls, and a demure, well-behaved foster daughter. Rules after rules. What to do and what not to do. [...] What have I become? (p.164)

Sadly, Jiaxi simply disappears at a point. Another story for another day, if I may, for her tale damn-near demands to be told. One can only hope we don't have to wait another six years for it to finally unfold, as we did this sequel of sorts to Tei's multiple award-nominated first novel, Little Hut of Leaping Fishes.

The Mouse Deer Kingdom isn't its equal, I fear. It's episodic, dare I say disjointed. Inelegant in some spots, and in others all too obvious. "The awkwardness of it was equal to that of a forest child in an outsiders' world. Not here, not there. Not this, not that." (p.311) But like Engi, and to a greater or lesser extent the determined man who takes him in, it does discover its purpose before the story's over.

Largely this is thanks to Tei's knack with characters — Chai and Engi, Martin and Tiansheng, Meilian and Jiaxi... all come to life like few figures in fiction do, and develop dramatically over the years The Mouse Deer Kingdom chronicles. The narrative is no slouch either, aside some structural strangeness and an intermittent pacing problem. Indeed, the cruel and unusual denouement squeezed a tear or two out of yours truly.

This is a beautiful little book, to be sure; a tragic family saga along the lines of Kate Atkinson's Life After Life about outsiders in a land that seems set on smiting them. The Mouse Deer Kingdom may be less affecting overall than Chiew-Siah Tei's debut, but it has its heart in the right place: at home with Chai and his fantastic family.

***

The Mouse Deer Kingdom
by Chiew-Siah Tei

UK Publication: October 2013, Picador

Buy this book from
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Recommended and Related Reading

Guest Post | "Taverns Measureless to Man" by Tim Powers

To mark the paperback publication of his newest book, Hide Me Among the Graves — a sequel of sorts to his classic 1989 novel The Stress of Her Regard which has been described as "Dickens as directed by David Lynch" — in addition to the re-release last week of Last Call as one of Gollancz's new-fangled Fantasy Masterworks, it's my pleasure to welcome the one and only Tim Powers to The Speculative Scotsman, to talk about nothing less momentous than how steampunk started.

***

If you ever find yourself thirsty in Orange, California, you could do worse than to stop in at a place near the Orange Circle called O'Hara's Pub and order a pitcher of beer. Sit at one of the booths right across from the bar, and you're right where Steampunk started in about 1976.

Of course lots of books that we now recognize as Steampunk were published before that — Harry Harrison's A Transatlantic Tunnel, Hurrah! and Michael Moorcock's Warlord of the Air, and Keith Laumer's Worlds of the Imperium, to name just three — but it was K. W. Jeter who coined the term that made the subgenre distinct, and Jeter was sitting in that booth in '76, along with James Blaylock and me.

The three of us were, or had recently been, English majors at a local college, and all three of us wanted to write science fiction and fantasy books. Jeter and I had in fact recently sold novels to a very low-paying publisher called Laser Books, and my own plan had been to go on writing books for Laser and live on two-thousand dollars a year... but Laser folded, and the three of us were left to while away the afternoons over endless pitchers of beer at O'Hara's.

Mornings too — I remember standing with Blaylock outside of O'Hara's before the place opened, and quoting Omar Khayyam:

And, as the Cock crew, those who stood before

The Tavern shouted - "Open then the Door!

"You know how little while we have to stay,

"And, once departed, may return no more."

And I'm sure I quoted Coleridge about passing "through taverns measureless to man, down to a sunless sea."

But luckily Laser had not been the only light that failed — the editor at Laser had told us that a British publisher wanted a series of novels based on the idea of King Arthur being reincarnated over the centuries to save the West from various catastrophes, and we had got busy writing them — but eventually the British publisher had become disenchanted with the notion, and all three of us were left with books about reincarnated King Arthur and no publisher.

Jeter, fortunately for us all, had chosen Victorian England as the setting for one of his — Morlock Night, which was eventually published in 1979 — and he found, and told Blaylock and I about, Henry Mayhew. Mayhew was a journalist who wrote in painstaking detail about the lives of all sorts of poor people in Victorian London, honest and crooked, and two collections of his work, Mayhew's London and London's Underworld, were in print. Presented with such a near-infinite source of research details, all three of us proceeded to write science fiction and/or fantasy novels set in 19th century London. And we managed to sell them.

I believe Blaylock had actually seen London, if briefly; Jeter and I had not. And all three of us were writing about a London that existed more in our heads than it ever had in reality, largely derived from Robert Louis Stevenson and Charles Dickens and Arthur Conan Doyle. The books we wrote about it are now three decades old, and I must admit I look back at them, and the times in which we wrote them, with fondness. And when Jeter, Blaylock and I are sometimes credited with having started Steampunk, I politely don't argue.

***

Thank you a thousand times for the insight into steampunk's early years, Tim, and for taking the time to stop off at The Speculative Scotsman.

If you're looking for more from the man, then to begin with there are his books — every one of which I've read I'd recommend — but be aware, as well, that "Taverns Measureless to Man" is just the latest in a line of great guest posts he's put together for a few of my favourite blogs, including Fantasy Book Critic, Falcata Times, A Fantastical Librarian, SF Signal, Civilian Reader and Fantasy Book Review.

Plus he'll be propping up Pornokitsch all of next week, I believe.

Book Review | The Devil's Apprentice by Jan Siegel

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IndieBound / The Book Depository

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The Devil is retiring... but who’s taking over?

When teenage Pen inherits the job of caretaker for a London building with no doors and only a secret entrance from the caretaker’s lodge — which she must never use — little does she know it will lead her into unbelievable danger. For Azmordis, also known as Satan, a spirit as old as Time and as powerful as the Dark, Immortality is running out.

In the house with no front door, a group of teenagers are trapped in assorted dimensions of myth and history, undergoing the trials that will shape them to step into his cloven footwear — or destroy them. Assisted by only by an aspiring teenage chef called Gavin and Jinx, a young witch with more face-piercing than fae-power, Pen must try to stop the Devil’s deadly game plan — before it’s too late.

***

A dead man lives in Temporal Crescent. A Mr. Andrew Pyewackett, to be precise. He passed away seven years before the events of The Devil's Apprentice, but he's stuck around since to be sure that the unholy house he spent his lifetime looking after is left to someone sensible, someone undaunted by its particular... idiosyncrasies.

He has the ideal man in mind — Bartlemy Goodman, of no fixed above — alas, no one has been able to find the fellow, and in the period his lax lawyers have been looking, Pyewackett has gone to pieces. Quite literally. As he admits, "I simply can't go on like this. [...] Flesh and blood won't stand it. Let's face it, they aren't meant to. Look at me, I'm already falling to bits — every time I remove my socks several toes fall off. I need to get out of this body and move on. Arrangements will have to be made." (p.14)

These arrangements are as strange as the circumstances which made them a must. Pyewackett instructs the family firm to appoint Penelope Anne Tudor — Pen to you and me — as interim executor of his remaining estate. She's to move into the adjoining property, which comes complete with a brilliant butler and its very own pair of haunted falsers, the better to continue the search for the lost legatee.

Thing of it is, Pen's only thirteen, and her grandmother will never go along with this madness... will she?

She would never be allowed to stay in Temporal Crescent and do her job. And she wanted to. She wanted it more than anything in her life. It was maturity, responsibility, freedom. She had decided she wasn't worried about the danger element — a house surely couldn't be dangerous, with or without a front door. Whatever might happen, she would handle it. 

If she got the chance. (p.40)

She gets the chance.

Let us pause before we talk about the plot proper to consider this: one of my only problems with what is otherwise a magnificent new novel. Pen's gran is an absolute pushover. She takes precious little convincing in the first instance, is largely absent after the fact, and when there's a murder outside 7A several weeks later, dear old Eve expresses her regrets and then simply goes about her business. Which seems, in short, to be shopping.

This is one of the genre's peculiar problems. Reminiscent of modern horror's struggle to strand its characters in isolated environments in a world where such places are truly few and far between, the YA narrative must arrange, often implausibly, for its pubescent protagonists to be let loose by the adults in charge of their care; adults who would in all probability spoil the fun for everyone. In The Devil's Apprentice, Jan Siegel simply dismisses the need for a decent rationale as to why Pen and her pals can run riot, and that did bother me a bit.

Besides this, though, The Devil's Apprentice is fantastic fun, especially once we find out what the house is all about. No. 7 Temporal Crescent isn't haunted, as it happens. Instead:

"It's something called a space/time prison," Pen said. "I don't know what that is, but all the doors open on different bits of the past, or magical dimensions, and if you go through you'll get lost, sort of absorbed into history. Like if you're in the eighteenth century, that's where you think you belong. It stops people going around changing the course of events." (p.92)

As soon as Pyewackett passes on, Pen sets about investigating No. 7 in earnest. By the time Gavin Lester let himself into the adjoining quarters she's already been attacked by a velociraptor, so Pen is happy for him to help. He's looking for Bartlemy Goodman too — Gavin believes Bartlemy may be the man to teach him how to be Great Britain's best chef — as is Jinx, a little witch who comes a-calling because she's intercepted whispers from double-dealing demons about a unique job opportunity.

No one believes in the Devil any more. He went out of fashion with wimples and witch-trials, made a brief comeback with the powdered wig, the bal masque and the Marquis de Sade, popped up in the London smog somewhere between the crinoline and the bustle, and vanished for good into a world of kitsch horror films in the mid/late twentieth century. Evil went on, of course, but Evil is made by humans; we need no supernatural help for that. But there is someone who feeds off our evil — who feeds it and feeds off it — the Rider of Nightmares, the Eater of Souls, the God of Small Print, and if he no longer wears horns and a tail that is merely a matter of style. Modern thinking belittles him, superstition touches wood for him, children dance around his maypole — but never widdershins, always with the sun. He hides in folktale and fear, in legends and lies — don't speak his name, or he may hear you, don't whistle, or he may come to you. If you believe in fairies, don't clap, for there are darker things than the sidhe in the World Beyond Midnight. Call him a myth, call him a fantasy, for myth and fantasy do no exist. 

He exists. (pp.49)

He indubitably does in The Devil's Apprentice, and indeed, he's looking to train his eventual successor, who he's decided must come from the mortal realm.

To be completely clear, Jinx doesn't want the job: she wants to stop whoever does. Because better the devil you know, you know?

She and Gavin and Pen are in any event a terrific trio of troublemakers who work wonderfully as one. Pen is our resident sceptic. Pyewackett hiring her "was the most magical thing that had ever happened to her, except she didn't believe in magic. Unlike her friends, she didn't read fantasy books — in fact, she read very little fiction at all since she couldn't see the point of it, though her grandmother had ensured she had a basic knowledge of all the classics. But Pen preferred facts. [...] In her view, imagination just got you into trouble." (p.24) Jinx the witch is by definition Pen's polar opposite, though they get on pretty well for all that, whilst she and Martin are at odds with one another from the first, which needless to say leads to some smartly barbed banter.

In Jan Siegel's capable hands the entirety of The Devil's Apprentice is rather smart, in fact. The novel's long chapters are punctuated by ominous interludes set elsewhere and elsewhen which do a great job of enlivening the story's more mundane moments... though there are few of these, in truth. Accordingly, the plot is a joy: the premise all potential — above and beyond what goes on in this novel — and in execution even better, equal parts chilling and thrilling.

Take, say, The Graveyard Book by Neil Gaiman as a base. Fold in a little K. J. Parker, perhaps, and fill with Jasper Fforde a la The Last Dragonslayer. Season to taste with finely ground J. K. Rowling and serve with a generous helping of Diana Wynne Jones' wonderful whimsy. It may be that I've been mainlining The Great British Bake Off in recent weeks, but Gavin — the would-be cook of this delectable new book — would approve, I'm sure.

Jan Siegel has been silent, sadly, since the unceremonious sinking of her Sangreal trilogy in 2006. A young adult fantasy for all the family certainly wasn't what I expected from her new novel, but with a hint of the sinister and a smidgen of silliness, it's such bloody good fun that it's a pleasure most piquant to welcome her back to the business of witty literature.

Don't go anywhere, eh? Pretty please with a temporal cherry on top!

***

The Devil's Apprentice
by Jan Siegel

UK & US Publication: October 2013, Ravenstone

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