The longdogs are flattened by the heat, as is your crumbling host, and walking them at the moment is like dragging bricks on a piece of string. So, O best beloveds, we make a quick and chaotic rush to the front line in the middle of much industry. Cathulhu, a feline RPG and fiction anthology campaign that’s over in around twenty four hours, in case you fancy it; a full review of Lavie Tidhar’s The Bookman, which is only eighteen months late, and hasty home news. Cutting edge!
The hasty home news: Old greydog is at the final stages of completing his novel The Assassin’s Coin, about which more some other time, but it is due out from IFD Publishing in October. The ODQ Presents anthology of longer supernatural fiction has gone for formatting (preparing the galleys for a last proofing and so on), and should be out in August from Ulthar Press. A second expanded edition of greydog’s A Persistence of Geraniums collection is also coming in the Autumn, and the anthology Hell’s Empire is due November or December 2018. It’s a bit of a busy time.
Firstly, we wanted to mention Cathulhu: Tails of Valor and Terror – a collection of adventures for the Cathulhu Role Playing Game, with a companion short story collection of Cat horror stories, both from Golden Goblin Press.
‘From The Cats of Ulthar to those owned by Delapore in The Rats in the Walls, cats have held a special place of honor in the heart of H.P. Lovecraft. They are deeply embedded into the lore of the Cthulhu Mythos. We hope you’ll join us on our journey into the world of Cathulhu, cats battling mythos horrors. Cathulhu – Velvet Paws on Cthulhu’s Trail is a horror role playing game by Sixtystone Press, an offshoot of the Call of Cthulhu RPG where the players portray cats investigating the Cthulhu Mythos.’
This Kickstarter ends at teatime, by British clocks, on Sunday 29th July, so you have only a day or so to check it out – there’s loads more information on the writers and the scenarios on the campaign page below. It looks fun.
Meanwhile, in the fantasy and steampunk world, one of our intrepid reviewers, Matt Willis, kindly picked up something which kept slipping through our gnarled fingers. Other reviews have varied from describing the book as a wonderfully vivid alternate history of a Britain ruled by giant lizards to finding the plot over-packed and occasionally confusing. Let’s see what Matt made of it…
The Bookman, Lavie Tidhar
Angry Robot, 2016 (reissue)
Review by Matt Willis
“When his beloved is killed in a terrorist atrocity committed by the sinister Bookman, young poet Orphan becomes enmeshed in a web of secrets and lies. His quest to uncover the truth takes him from the hidden catacombs of a London on the brink of revolution, through pirate-infested seas, to the mysterious island that may hold the secret to the origin, not only of the shadowy Bookman, but of Orphan himself…”
This is the first in Lavie Tidhar’s Bookman Histories trilogy, originally published in 2010 but reissued by Angry Robot a couple of years ago. If you like your steampunk tropes coming at you thick and fast, you won’t go far wrong with The Bookman. Whether or not it’s technically steampunk is open to question, but the aesthetic is slap-bang in that territory – ‘Babbage Machines’ abound, alongside sophisticated automata, ‘baruch-landau’ steam cars, space guns and Edwardian Martian probes. A seedy London demi-monde gives way to fantastical Verne-esque landscapes.
The richness of the world is seen no less in its cast, where real historical figures rub shoulders with minor and major characters from dozens of novels, plays and poems – in some cases leading to the bizarre situation of authors interacting with characters they created. Not to mention the fact that some of those figures with familiar names appear in a distinctly unfamiliar form… Characters created by Conan Doyle mix with those from Thomas Hughes and the paranoid fantasies of David Icke, and they with real life actors, writers, astronomers-Royal, celebrity recipe-book creators and body-snatchers, in a world where pods of whales swim in the Thames and the ruling class is distinctly scaly.
All in all, the worldbuilding of The Bookman is a glorious mishmash, a gothic cathedral of a book drawing its influences from as many quarters as possible and wearing them proudly for all to see. I feel as though I failed to pick up half of the references, and as a student of English and American literature and a long-time fan of SF, weird fiction and historical fiction, I feel that is saying something. Not that you need to be completely familiar with everything from Wells to Wilde to follow the book, far from it, but the dramatic scenery will undoubtedly give an extra reward to those whose reading tastes are prolific and catholic.
This is no prose ‘League of Extraordinary Gentlemen’, mind you. While The Bookman is undoubtedly an adventure, and a rollicking one at that, it’s a bit more than the stitched together carcass of 19th century scientific romances and animated with a galvanic charge. The narrative is nuanced and has plenty to say about the nature of the differences between us, between man and machine, of authority and security, myth and reality. It is unashamedly postmodernist (I mean that in the proper sense of the word, not in the conspiracy-fantasist, Jordan Peterson sense) but it does not lack heart.
Although it’s perhaps in that heart that The Bookman finds its one aspect that lacks nuance – Orphan, the central character. This is not necessarily a shortcoming – he is something of an Everyman onto which readers can impose themselves, and indeed, an absence onto which agencies in the book can impose their agendas. He has one straightforward goal, which is to recover his lost love, Lucy, and around him labyrinthine conspiracies, plots and counter-plots swirl. The narrative will constantly keep the reader guessing as to who is on whose side and if those distinctions have any real meaning. Not to mention who or what The Bookman is, and what he wants. It’s also unclear until the end not just what the broad outcome will be, but which outcome we might want to take place. Perhaps under those circumstances it’s entirely appropriate that Orphan’s greatest flaw is passivity in the face of the vast machinery driving events (or perhaps occasionally a surfeit of earnestness). A metaphor throughout the book is a game of chess, and Orphan is frequently, to his annoyance, likened to a pawn. It’s an irony that he turns out to be quite a different piece.
The reissued edition has an additional story – ‘A Murder In The Cathedral!’ – placed after the main narrative concludes, which is self-contained but takes place during the period of the book itself. The reason for presenting this episode separately becomes clear on reading it. There are moments of humour in The Bookman, and generally it stays just on the right side of taking itself too seriously, but ‘A Murder In The Cathedral!’ is far more light-hearted and satirical in tone. Here we meet a phalanx of late-19th century scribes all journeying to Paris for Le Convention du Monde, where they vie for the (Victor) Hugo awards. It’s amusing and sharp, and would have seemed very out of place in the main narrative, not to mention slowing the pace to a crawl. As it is, it’s a fine Easter Egg for the dedicated reader. The Bookman itself is a delightful read and highly recommended. I suspect, had it only included more longdogs, it could have been written especially for a greydogtales’ audience.
Amazon UK http://amzn.eu/amKH2rB
Amazon US http://a.co/ezchyaV
Do return in a few days, when The Assassin’s Coin’ will have gone to the publisher and we have a bit more time. We might even get a proper Lurchers for Beginners post done this Summer!