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.