Books: Early Riser By Jasper Fforde (2019)

"During those bitterly cold four months, the nation is a snow-draped landscape of desolate loneliness and devoid of human activity. Well, not quite. Your name is Charlie Worthing and it's your first season with the Winter Consuls, the committed but mildly unhinged group of misfits who are responsible for ensuring the hibernatory safe passage of the sleeping masses. You are investigating an outbreak of viral dreams which you dismiss as nonsense; nothing more than a quirky artifact borne of the sleeping mind.When the dreams start to kill people, it's unsettling. When you get the dreams too, it's weird. When they start to come true, you begin to doubt your sanity. But teasing truth from Winter is never easy: You have to avoid the Villains and their penchant for murder, kidnapping and stamp collecting, ensure you aren't eaten by Nightwalkers whose thirst for human flesh can only be satisfied by comfort food, and sidestep the increasingly less-than-mythical WinterVolk. But so long as you remember to wrap up warmly, you'll be fine."

For the most part, after Jasper Fforde released the seventh Thursday Next book, The Woman Who Died A Lot in 2012, he took hiatus (only releasing the third book of his YA series The Last Dragonslayer: The Eye of Zoltar in 2014). Apparently, as he notes in his Acknowledgements at the back of the book, this was not planned as he suffered -what he calls- the “creative hiatus of 2014-2016.” And thus Early Riser (released in the UK in August of 2018 but not the US until February 2019), became his first adult novel to be released in 6 years.  While it’s sad to hear he suffered so much (and is still working through the problems and is hoping to return to a more regular release schedule), he does accomplish much with this stand-alone novel.

Much like his other series, Early Riser continues Fforde’s fascination of telling comic fantasy stories all set within an alternative England. This one, however, may have more crossover appeal, as it’s quite the genre jumping: sci-fi, fantasy, dreamscape fiction, apocalypse, mystery, and a coming-of-age tale. It’s also pretty flat-out funny as well. Sure the humor is more satirical, sly, and often odd, but Fforde clearly grasps the absurdity of his plots and –more importantly, his readers’ intelligence- and feels little need to really explain anything. But for folks who don’t need everything spelled out, reading anything of Fforde’s is a treat. The book is also takes on some fairly obvious commentary about capitalism and there some historical observations between the relationships of the English and Welsh communities, but he never really hits you over the head with his metaphors. And he also gets a bit meta from time to time as well, especially with the character of Toccata goes on about loathing gaps: “Gaps in doors, gaps in bathroom tiles, long gaps between sequels to books.”

Yes, Mr. Fforde, where is the next Thursday Next book, the next Nursery Crime Division book, or the next Shades of Grey book? Sadly, we may never see more of the last two, but I won’t discount an 8^th trip with Thursday Next. And –at least in the UK- there will a fourth The Dragonslayer…in 2021.

None the less, if alive, I'll be there to read them.