My passion for books is not simple…I love books.

Little books that hardly trifle the mind and are consumed like candy; Heavy books that draw you down into the deep places of the heart and soul; Surprising books that seem to be one thing and achieve loftier things all together before they finish.  I love old books.  I love old styles of storytelling.  I love things that revel in the best parts of past times, and the worst parts of the past peoples that breathe life into the pages.  And I love the fantastic; the “beyond the horizon”, “over the edge”, “the stuff of dreams and nightmares” kind of fantastic.

I’ve felt frustrated recently, that the last crop of fantastic fiction stood on the promises of prior works and forms and did very little to actually find a new voice.  While there have been many exceptions (like Gaiman and De Lint and Valente), there seems to have been an overall dearth of voices with something new to say.  While there is nothing wrong with revisiting proven styles, and capitalizing on well worn (and obviously popular) paths, there was something wearisome in the last crop of stories being offered.

“Oh, look, another vampire novel.  I wonder if that one features ghosts…why yes, yes it does.  Not-Quite-Buffy the Secret Agent/Super Hero/Vampire Slayer meets the-dark-and-brooding-embodiment-of-angst-who-might-be-but-isn’t-really-evil.  Again.”

If you’re going to create something new from the old, at least try to make something compelling.

Which brings me to my most recent read, less than an hour from my fingers; I have just closed the cover on Johnathan Barnes “The Somnambulist” and I find myself delightfully conflicted.

Either this book is the single best expansion of a genre by parody of, tweaking, teasing and generally robbing wholesale from that genre with the delighted earnestness of a child turned loose in a chocolate factory…

…or it was the worst Frankenstein’s monster of stitched together plagiarism ever perpetrated on the literary world at large.

The fact that it leaves that question in doubt is probably a testament to the sheer power and quality of the book as a whole, and of Mr. Barnes as an author.

Also, I assure you the entire “Frankenstein’s Monster” allusion is a compliment.

As a lover of Victoriana in almost all of its forms, and especially its literature, this book held the promise of swimming, no drowning, in a celebration of the delights of fiction from the 19^th century.  From Conan Doyle to Dickens, Poe to Prescott, and From Shelly (Mary) to…well…Shelly (Byce Percy), this book covers an almost impossibly wide spectrum.

Almost every element of this novel is taken from somewhere else.  If you’ve read the fiction that it idolizes, then you’ve likely read EVERY SINGLE SENTINCE in this book before.  Not in this order, perhaps not with these exact spellings…but at its core it is the literary embodiment of Mary Shelly’s titular protagonist:  It is hulking, brooding, made of dead things, easily misunderstood, and with a pure heart and a wonderfully unusual execution.

It begins with a self effacing authorial note, a declaration that the narrator is unapologetically unreliable, and then introduces a set of characters stolen IN WHOLE from the most famous stories in its genre’s heyday.  The protagonist, one Edward Moon, is less a homage to Edwin Drood and more a repurposing of him for a new tale.  The titular character is lifted directly, name and all, from “The Cabinet of Dr. Cagliari” and even the minor character of “Mina the bearded whore” is clearly drawn from the sideshow freaks popular in 19^th century traveling shows (and the fiction written about them).

Mina, like every character presented in the first two thirds of the book, is a bit of a nesting box puzzle.  She’s a complexly rendered character who is both sympathetic and villainous without being something so cardboard as “merely evil” in the typical sense, nor is she a sympathetic damsel-in-distress female archetype ether. Like so many things in this book, she is a disconcerting mixture of both.

And this is where the narrative device will get you, as the narrator is professedly unreliable from the beginning with an abject hatred of the hero; you never really know what parts of the story are intentionally misrepresented to present the hero in the worst possible light.  Nothing here is cut-and-dried, nothing is easy to follow.  Yet, the book is as engaging and involving as anything I’ve read in ages.

Because the book makes no attempt to paint the hero or his companions in a positive light (and in fact goes to great lengths to convince you that everyone is equally undesirable and driven by unsound motives) you often get conflicting pictures of the characters and their actions from chapter to chapter.

The whole literary device is built up and suspended like a masterful house of cards right up until the final sequence plays out.  The close of the book is a kinetic, chaotic, confusing sequence of catastrophes and cataclysms that play out in Victorian London in a sequence of events that you can’t trust the narrator to render in either proper order or even with functional descriptions.

Much of the resolution point of the story is revealed as a fait accompli catalyzed by a pair of deus ex machina (dis ex machina?) who’s motivations are so poorly defined that they undermine the already unhinged narrator beyond any hope of even minute believability.

Which might well be the point of the whole work, that chaos begats chaos, and that as our society becomes more and more inclusive and chaotic and dependant on things beyond our individual control, society itself becomes the monster.

Or…Johnathan Barnes has completely lost his ever loving mind and let Rhesus Monkeys on crack write the last chapters while blindfolded, dictating the whole thing to a text-to-speech system with the language recognition system set for “Ugaritic” instead of “English” (or even “Monkey” for that matter).

The ultimate question is “did I like it?” And the answer is “no.”

On the one hand I loved it.  It was challenging and yet compellingly readable.  Great characters, a wonderful literary device, and overall execution of both “a book” and “a story” that was excellent on multiple levels.

On the other hand, I’d have a hard time recommending it to anyone.  The content is so genre specific, if you don’t love the source material, you won’t enjoy the resulting effort.  Also, the ending is a challenge.  It challenges logic, patience, and one’s ability to afford an author the privilege of telling his story in his own way.

This was an experience where I got to the end and immediately had to ask myself “what in the ever-loving-FUCK was that?!?”  Not a negative thing by any stretch, but not something that can easily be recommended to someone else either.

For myself, it was wonderful and I’ll read it again; and I look forward to Johnathan Barnes next book with great anticipation.  For anyone else, I simply invite you to read at your own risk.

This is a new thing made from old things, and a complex thing made from simple parts.  It has a heart and a soul, but like so many delicate things, it meets its end in a disturbing, sudden, and somewhat difficult way.