This is the first of three (so far) “dark comic fantasy” novels by someone better known for his interactive fiction work (Jonathan L Howard, designer of games such as Broken Sword). It’s the story of a necromancer who gave up his soul years before in order to learn the secrets of necromancy but now makes a bet with Satan to get his soul back. It’s intended to be a black comedy wth a likeable antihero. I think it just about succeeds but has some significant flaws. The biggest flaw is its lack of a sense of time or place. The individual settings of scenes are not badly done, but the overall geography is missing barring a description which could equally apply to the Fens in the UK, the Forida Everglades or the Netherlands. From the author’s nationality and residence and little bits and pieces one eventually gathers that this is supposed to be some version of England, though the characters are a little mid-Atlantic ad the one clear linguistic clue to setting is one character’s use of “Mom”. The question of time period is even more difficult. At times it looks like the 1920s or 30s. At others it’s reminiscent of the 70s and still others place it in the sempiternal now. It’s not clear whether this is supposed to be our world with hidden dark forces or a parallel one where dark forces are known and understood, at first. The occurrence of a zombie army and the fame of the eponymous character for single-handedly stopping them implies the open world, but it’s sho shadily drawn that t rather distracts from the main plot. This plot is OK, but nothing to write home about (though I’m doing that now, I suppose).<\/p>\n
An OK book, but there are better examples of the genre out there, such as Ben Aaronovich’s Rivers of London.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
This is the first of three (so far) “dark comic fantasy” novels by someone better known for his interactive fiction work (Jonathan L Howard, designer of games such as Broken Sword). It’s the story of a necromancer who gave up his soul years before in order to learn the secrets of necromancy but now makes […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[19,36,17,38],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-454","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-sf-books","category-books","category-sf","category-books-sf"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/blog.a-cubed.info\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/454","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/blog.a-cubed.info\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/blog.a-cubed.info\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blog.a-cubed.info\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blog.a-cubed.info\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=454"}],"version-history":[{"count":4,"href":"https:\/\/blog.a-cubed.info\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/454\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":459,"href":"https:\/\/blog.a-cubed.info\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/454\/revisions\/459"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/blog.a-cubed.info\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=454"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blog.a-cubed.info\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=454"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blog.a-cubed.info\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=454"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}