Darkness at the Edge of Town by Brian Keene (2010): Enjoyable but slighter and less juicily pulpy novel from the reliable Keene, who's made a fascinating career out of combining cosmic horror with splatterpunky, visceral violence.
Walden, Virginia wakes up one morning to find itself surrounded on all sides by an almost solid darkness. Some people drive to work. Some stay home. Landlines and cellphones won't connect to anything. All the utilities are out. And when you walk up to the darkness, you start to hear voices and see visions of your loved ones. This is only the beginning.
While not part of one of Keene's acknowledged series, Darkness at the Edge of Town nonetheless fits into the larger schemata of most of Keene's novels, which deal with one or more cosmic threats to life on Earth. Well, life on Earths: each Earth is part of a larger multiverse. While one novel may depict the destruction of all life on one Earth by, say, giant earthworms, another novel may depict the salvation of another Earth by a recurring character such as Keene's Amish magician, Levi. And Levi, too, is duplicated across countless Earths.
Mysterious symbols drawn at points along Walden's town boundary coincide with the line where the darkness stopped. A mysterious homeless man -- Walden's only homeless man -- may have something to do with the symbols. Or did he summon the darkness? Our narrator, an underemployed pizza delivery guy in his 20's, will try to find out. Because the darkness very rapidly starts to make people more and more violent and crazy.
There are elements of metatext here -- a character notes at one point that our narrator's plan to explore the darkness comes right out of Stephen King's The Mist and should thus be avoided because of the dire results of the tactic in both novella and movie. The title comes from a Springsteen song. Many of the group dynamics are reminiscent of both The Mist and King's Under the Dome, though any resemblances to the latter would simply be a case of shared sub-genre, as the two novels came out within a handful of months of one another.
The dire violence and madness that quickly infect the town are solidly depicted, with several stand-out moments of gross-out horror. The cosmic elements don't work so well, in part because Keene's narrator simply isn't written as a character capable of describing dread or terror. Dez, the homeless madman, manages to Basil Exposition us for several pages near the end, but this seems both too little and much too late. We've seen towns disintegrate under crisis in horror novels before. What makes this narrative different?
Well, utter helplessness, a well Keene goes to repeatedly in his novels, though it's usually leavened with a group of characters doing their best to stave off the apocalypse, even if they fail utterly. Here, though, our narrator and his friends just aren't up to taking on the darkness. And they seem to miss one glaringly obvious thing that a competent person might at least try, given that we're stuck inside the bottle of this narrative for what the narrator estimates is at least a month. I don't need a Heinlein hero in my horror, but the readerly frustration that attends the nihilistic helplessness and pettiness and dim-bulbedness of our heroes leaves one longing for death after awhile. Their death, that is. Go darkness!
Now, this frustration seems to me to perhaps be the point. Keene has given us a novel with an even less bright, less competent, less heroic cast than usual, and has set them against an unbeatable foe. But it's all too much. As T.E.D. Klein noted, himself quoting another critic, I don't see what the point of the point is. Lightly recommended.
Jonathan Strange & Mr. Norrell by Susanna Clarke (2004): One of the staples of historical fantasy and science fiction is the "changed premise" alternate history, in which one difference gives us a new Earth to ponder. Clarke's award-winning first novel gives us that changed premise in an England where magic works, fairies are real, and Northern England was ruled for hundreds of years by John Uskglass, the Raven King.
But as we advance through the years covered by the novel -- 1806-1817 -- we discover a curious thing. History has pretty much progressed, and continues to progress, exactly as it did in our world. To note the biggest example of this, the Napoleonic Wars play out exactly as they did in our world, despite Great Britain and its allies having the services of two powerful magicians. Is this an imaginative failing on the part of the novel? Well, yes. It's hard to believe in magic when it seems to be zero-sum.
I can see why a lot of people -- and perhaps more non-fantasy readers than fantasy readers -- praised the novel. It's a triumph of pastiche and multiple stylistic homages to writers that include Jane Austen and Charles Dickens. But it's also thin as spring ice. After a 1000 pages, most characters still possess only a few defining characteristics. The two main characters -- Strange and Norrell, England's first two practicing magicians in a couple of centuries -- are defined by arrogance and fear, respectively, and little else.
Many of the supporting characters fall into one of two camps: the thinly drawn sympathetic and the pseudo-Dickensian grotesque. But our sympathies for the most ill-served-by-events character in the novel must develop entirely from the situation she's placed in: she has no actual personality traits that aren't reactions to her situation. Another character is pretty much entirely defined by being nice and slightly worried. With 1000 pages to work with, Clarke perhaps could have given us more, though the book did need room for all the pseudo-scholarly footnotes on the history of English magic. Actually, many of the footnotes are more magical and interesting than the primary text.
And oh, that mannered style. Arch and distancing, it renders much of the text droll and occasionally cutting, but it also makes sympathy for the characters difficult. The archness of style and the thinness of the characters don't mix well with the epic scope of the novel. And for the main plot to proceed, several supposedly smart characters have to be unsatisfyingly stupid and dense for a very, very, very long time (ten years and several hundred pages).
But anyway, there's magic. It comes back from somewhere. Two Englishmen, the exceedingly bookish Mr. Norrell and the more public Mr. Strange, learn how to use it. Strange helps with the Napoleonic Wars in Europe; Norrell helps with the defense of England. The true plot grows from Norrell's second work of public magic, the one that established him as a magician to be reckoned with in polite society in London. The lesson to be learned: Don't trust fairies.
I'm glad I read the novel, though I can't say I ever want to read another one by Clarke. The racial and gender critiques in the novel are about as thuddingly obvious as they come. The fantastic universe itself makes very little sense: how did magic change absolutely nothing about the history of England? Because the novel needs everything to be the same for its pastiche elements to work properly, I suppose is the only answer. And a real 'What if?' novel might scare away a lot of the paying customers, the ones who like Jane Austen but can't tell a hobbit from a hat-pin.
There are weird historical miscues (Clarke seems to be unaware that a height of 5'9" wouldn't make a man seem tiny in 1816, given that it would actually be above average height). And there really isn't an ending so much as a stoppage in play. The pay-offs to two of the main plot-threads are so muted as to almost be non-existent, while a third becomes a culmination of a deus ex machina that removes much of the agency from Strange and Norrell themselves. There's certainly room for a sequel. I'm sure it will be long. Lightly recommended.
