Mashup novels are more pretentious because they ape the writing style of classic authors like Jane Austen, Charlotte Brontë, Louisa May Alcott, et al. The level of collateral damage among the humans also increases of decreases in line with the intended readership. A hero(ine) is confronted by dangerous thingies selected from the supernatural/horror back-catalogue and, at the end of the book, he or she has won the day, or the night depending on the beasties. The formula is the same no matter whether the genre label is steampunk or contemporary urban fantasy. In many cases, there’s no particular purpose to be served except to produce a different backdrop against which to slaughter vampires, zombies and assorted other creatures. But, before we actually set off with the review of this most recent addition to the Tim Powers canon, we need to spend a little while thinking about the creative process.īoth in what are now called steampunk and mashup novels, there are emerging clichés with anachronistic technology and various supernatural beasties arbitrarily released into eras approximating the Georgian, Victorian or Edwardian. In that it has the Rossetti family as central characters and involves the Nephilim, it may properly be considered a form of sequel to The Stress of Her Regard, a novel published in 1989 and much celebrated.
In this case, we’re deep into Victorian times and embedded into the world of the poets from the Prologue in 1845 to the Epilogue in 1882. He ends up with her vengeful and deranged sister Josephine like most of Powers's heroes, Crawford and Josephine pay a terrible cost for their success.Well, with Hide Me Among the Graves by Tim Powers ( William Morrow, 2012), we’re back in alternate history territory with a cast of well-known characters encountering the supernatural. He weaves all these things together, along with the sad tale of Crawford whose wife is horribly killed on their wedding night. The Stress of Her Regard (Corvus, £8.99) was a gloomy historical fantasy in which Powers managed to combine the rise of the Habsburg Empire, the legend of the man who accidentally married a statue, vampirism, the Romantic obsession with mountains and the early deaths of Byron, Shelley and Keats. It is admirable that Corvus has started publishing him, and better that he has gone back to one of his best books of the 1980s, and found even more interesting things to do with its ideas. Tim Powers has always been one of dark fantasy's major eccentrics, and he has not mellowed or grown more ordinary with age.
0 kommentar(er)
