Books: My Brother's Keeper by Tim Powers (2023)

“When young Emily Brontë helps a wounded man she finds at the foot of an ancient pagan shrine in the remote Yorkshire moors, her life becomes contentiously entwined with his. He is Alcuin Curzon, embittered member of a sect working to eradicate the resurgent plague of lycanthropy in Europe and northern England. But Emily’s father, curate of the Haworth village church, is responsible for having unwittingly brought a demonic werewolf god to Yorkshire forty years ago—and it is taking possession of Emily’s beloved but foolish and dissolute brother. Curzon must regard Emily’s family as a dire threat. In spite of being at deadly odds, Emily and Curzon find themselves thrown together in fighting werewolves, confronting pagan gods, even saving each other from the lures of moorland demons. And in a final battle that sweeps from the haunted village of Haworth to a monstrous shrine far out on the moors, the two of them must be reluctant allies against an ancient power that seems likely to take their souls as well as their lives.”

 

I do have a love/hate relationship with the works of Tim Powers. I’ve still not read most of his canon, but I do like him. My issues stem from his tendency to world build so (and with little explanations) much that they interfere with his narrative flow. So it’s several chapters and maybe a hundred plus pages before the meat of the story really begins. His latest novel, My Brother’s Keeper, another in his period pieces of hidden history novels (Hide Me Among the Graves, Anubis Gate to name a few), does not so much suffer from that issue. Then again, maybe I am starting to get used his style. Over the decades, Powers has established a disturbingly, creepy world of the occult, a sort of alternate hidden world of gods. He’s dealt with vampires, ghosts, and other inhuman horrors, and now adds werewolves. So here, Powers jumps with both feet directly into this hidden world from chapter one. Not a huge fan of the werewolves to begin with, but an interesting choice to go with.

 

Like a few of his other books I’ve read, the plot does get little weird as it goes on, making it less a typical gothic horror tale readers might expect. Also note, by using the Brontë’s, it may also bewilder people who adore the work of Emily, Charlotte, Anne and their writer father Patrick. Because My Brother’s Keeper is not in any way a historical take of their lives, nor is it a reworking of their writings, or even written in their style, but a fun tale to read during the Halloween season about family curses, monsters buried under church slabs, supernatural beasts, ghosts, and a very good dog called Keeper.

Books: The Devil and Mrs. Davenport by Paulette Kennedy (2024)

 

"The first day of autumn brought the fever, and with the fever came the voices."

"Missouri, 1955. Loretta Davenport has led an isolated life as a young mother and a wife to Pete, an ambitious assistant professor at a Bible college. They’re the picture of domestic tranquillity—until a local girl is murdered and Loretta begins receiving messages from beyond. Pete dismisses them as delusions of a fevered female imagination. Loretta knows they’re real—and frightening. Defying Pete’s demands, Loretta finds an encouraging supporter in parapsychologist Dr. Curtis Hansen. He sees a woman with a rare gift, more blessing than curse. With Dr. Hansen’s help, Loretta’s life opens up to an empowering new purpose. But for Pete, the God-fearing image he’s worked so hard to cultivate is under threat. No longer in control of his dutiful wife, he sees the Devil at work. As Loretta’s powers grow stronger and the pleading spirits beckon, Pete is determined to deliver his wife from evil. To solve the mysteries of the dead, Loretta must first save herself."

Ultimately, for me, The Devil and Mrs. Davenport by Paulette Kennedy misses what first drew me to the book – the idea of ghosts and the dead communicating with the living. Instead, Kennedy borrows heavily from Stephen King, as Loretta is seemly a collection of his magical kids. She’s Carrie White, she’s Danny Torrance, she’s The Dead Zone’s Johnny Smith –with a little bit of IT and every small town with it’s dark underbelly.

Then there is the fact that Kennedy uses the lens of 2024 to look back at 1955. Now I’m not saying people like ‘Retta or her abusive husband did not exist then, but we get a classroom lesson of how much women were prisoners of their marriage – the only thing they could obtain back then. And Pete, oh irredeemable Pete, is much like my grandfather was –but without the religious overtones. He too forbade my grandmother from learning to drive, and when she “got out of line”, she learned to shut up. For me, it’s sad to know that I think my grandmother only learned to live in the decade between his death and hers. Only ten years of her eighty-six on the planet were given to doing what she wanted to do, with her own ideas and opinions.

Still, Loretta comes off as a woman who, like Calare Randall in the Outland series, somehow transported back in time so she can point out all the inequalities of women were forced into. It’s an education, I guess, but one most people probably already knew.

And poor Pete, who is immediately seen as the villain (might’ve had a Las Vegas sign hanging above his head that Kennedy constantly wants the reader to know). Pete is a teacher’s assistant at a Bible college trying to achieve tenure and when Loretta tells Pete of her dreams, the voice that led her to tell the police where the body of Darcy Hayes would be found, he is horrified (and a reminder of why I don’t believe in this stuff):

“Voices? You didn’t tell me you were hearing voices.” Pete stared at her, his eyes widening. He sat up, fumbled on the nightstand for his glasses. “That’s not prophecy. Or of a God. It’s delusional, Loretta.  You’ve heard people give a word of prophecy in church. If it’s real prophecy from the Holy Spirit, it’s always given in tongues first, and then an interpreter translates for the congregation, It’s for the edification of the faith. What you’re talking about…is…well. It’s not the same thing. At all.”

So yeah, as early as page twenty-one, I knew how this was going to end. And there is no real devil, with the exception of Loretta’s husband. Metaphors, catch them.

 

Books: Slow Horses By Mick Herron (2010)

“Slough House is where MI5 agents are sent when they've royally screwed up, with the hope that those agents will take the hint and resign from the service. Slow Horses, as they are called, are led by the reject of all MI5 rejects, Jackson Lamb, a slobbish, lazy has-been with dark secrets in his past. When Lamb is asked to run an errand for Regent's Park, he sends River Cartwright on his first out-of-the-office job since he landed in Slough House eight months earlier. How can rummaging through the trash bags of a washed up journalist link with the video of the hooded man waiting to be beheaded?”

 

So, I’m a bit of a slow horse to this series (sweet, Jebus, another series), which currently contains eight novels, a number of novella’s, and an Apple+ TV adaptation now in its fourth series (and already picked up for a fifth). Its recent multiple Emmy nominations sparked an interest in me, so I decided to find used versions (which was hard, but not altogether that difficult) of the first three.

 

I found this thriller about spies for MI5 who screw up, but instead of being fired, are sent to Slough House to do meaningless, paper pushing work to be darkly fun. I did struggle with at the start. Its age-old problem with series books because, like many TV pilots, the ensemble cast of characters, led by one Jackson Lamb (played by Gary Oldman on the show version), must be introduced. Each of them has their own issues and their own secrets (which made it confusing at first, as it became hard differentiate each character). Again, this is the first book in a series, so I do expect some slowness, as I worked my way through those character introductions in the first few chapters.

 

Slow Horses really is a new style of spy thriller, it being sharply witty and well plotted than others of this genre. It is not for fans of Le Carre’s hero of George Smiley (who Oldman has played before), but the dollops of dry British humor does make it fun. Also, this is no James Bond (though he and Moneypenny get name dropped) or Jason Bourne action series, with, girls, glitz, glamour, and gadgets. It’s firmly set in modern times with people more like Q than anything else.

 

The plot, although not breakneck like you'd expect from other novels in the genre, is well paced towards the middle part of the book and then the book really starts to fly.

 

Slow Horses does dance between serious drama, dark humor, and satire of the genre. So it’s not an outright comedy, but I could call it a variation of Hitchhikers Guide to the Galaxy for people who like morbid, twisty humor and spy thrillers. It also carries a bit of DNA from those old Cold War spy novels from decades ago, along a few modern British writers who are doing variations on a theme, including the supernatural tales of both Ben Aaronovitch and Charles Stross.

 

Finally, since I’m not up to date on British politics, I assume author Mick Herron based some of his characters on a few real-life politicians.