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: Stolen Skies By Tim Powers (2022)

“Sebastian Vickery has learned something about UFOs that he shouldn’t have—and Naval Intelligence, desperate to silence him, orders his old partner, Agent Ingrid Castine, to trap him. But Castine risks career, liberty, and maybe even life, to warn Vickery—and now they’re both fugitives, on the run from both the U.S. government and agents of the Russian GRU Directorate, which has its own uses for the UFO intelligence. With the unlikely aid of a renegade Russian agent, a homeless Hispanic boy, and an eccentric old Flat-Earther, Vickery and Castine must find an ancient relic that spells banishment to the alien species, and then summon the things and use it against them—in a Samson-like confrontation that looks likely to kill them as well. Sweeping from the Giant Rock monolith in the Mojave Desert to a cultist temple in the Hollywood Hills, from a monstrous apparition in the Los Angeles River to a harrowing midnight visitation on a boat off Long Beach Harbor."

Tim Powers uses his unique gift as a Los Angeles based writer to take real locations with bizarre histories and weave a one-of-a-kind tale. Here he uses Giant Rock, located in Landers California, which is known to be a beacon for UFO sightings and even landings. Sebastian Vickery and Ingrid Castine come together one more time to try to derail a UFO landing which will bring devastating effects in its wake. Powers work shines because he looks at places like Los Angeles from a different perspective, finding the dark corners of this City of Angels and to find the macabre and weirdness of this place. If the town has a soul, I guess, he certainly tries to explore it.

While Powers remains one of the more ambitious and unique voices in science fiction and dark fantasy today (he remains an underrated who really deserves a wider audience), for a broader audience, the fact that so little is explained and yet so much is assumed it can be infuriating. Also, for some odd reason, in Stolen Skies, Powers was constantly recapping of events from the first two books, something I found weird and distracting at the same time (not sure why he did this, as most authors writing series don’t do this). The plot is a bit convoluted as well, and it made me feel that Powers was not fully invested in concluding (?) this series.

But for new readers, maybe, this could lead to some of his other works. Some that are really is fantastic, with all that LA secret history, ghosts, and freeway-side gypsy nests.

Books: Declare By Tim Powers (2001)

As a young double agent infiltrating the Soviet spy network in Nazi-occupied Paris, Andrew Hale finds himself caught up in a secret, even more ruthless war. Two decades later, in 1963, he will be forced to confront again the nightmare that has haunted his adult life: a lethal unfinished operation code-named Declare. From the corridors of Whitehall to the Arabian desert, from postwar Berlin to the streets of Cold War Moscow, Hale's desperate quest draws him into international politics and gritty espionage tradecraft—and inexorably drives Hale, the fiery and beautiful Communist agent Elena Teresa Ceniza-Bendiga, and Kim Philby, mysterious traitor to the British cause, to a deadly confrontation on the high glaciers of Mount Ararat, in the very shadow of the fabulous and perilous Ark.

 I do have a problem with Powers style from time to time because he does use real life facts and places within his story and fits a supernatural one around it. This works a lot of the time, but here the book is caught in three speeds, slow, super slow, and then lightning fast. Regrettably, the book is overburden with so much minute detail of spying during WWII that I grew bored with it. In some ways, like John le Carré, that Powers insists on emulating, the history of spy’s and the final months of a world war are drawn with such detail, I felt I was reading a non-fiction book about spies. His cadence also seems old style, as he seemly is trying to emulate the way writers of the 1940s and early 1960s wrote. It gets distracting as well.

Huge portions of the text are given over to scenes of Andrew Hale involved in trying to keep his cover story clear, dealing with questionable people, with uncertain allegiances -which would look great on film or TV series, but it drags terribly in prose. It's slow, sometimes torturous and far too dense for its own good. A great deal of action happens, but the whole thing feels top-heavy: most of the good stuff is at the end, so you have to wade through a lot of extraneous material to get there. The underlying idea is fantastic, but by the time Powers got to the payoff, I had stopped caring.

As Tim Power says, ‘In a way, I arrived at the plot for this book by the same method that astronomers use in looking for a new planet—they look for “perturbations,” wobbles, in the orbits of planets they’re aware of, and they calculate mass and position of an unseen planet whose gravitational field could have caused the observed perturbations—and then they turn their telescopes on that part of the sky and search for a gleam. I looked at all the seemingly irrelevant “wobbles” in the lives of these people—Kim Philby, his father, T.E. Lawrence, Guy Burgess—and I made it an ironclad rule that I could not change or disregard any of the recorded facts, nor rearrange any days of the calendar—and then I tried to figure out what momentous but unrecorded fact could explain them all.’

Books: Forced Perspectives By Tim Powers (2020)

 

“In book one, Sebastian Vickery and Ingrid Castine had come together and been driven to cross over from ordinary reality into a nightmarish afterlife known as the labyrinth, a world populated by deceased or never-born spirits. They managed to return and close the gateway between these two worlds, but they also returned with the unique ability to perceive time differently.

Former Federal Agent/LA cop Sebastian Vickery is hiding out Barstow, while Ingrid Castine is back on the East Coast trying to live their lives. But both are still sensitive to the ghosts that haunt the modern Los Angeles highways, byways, and secret nooks and crannies, and are soon reunited and as they are plunged into the supernatural secrets of the vast city and its history—from the fallout of Satanic indie movies of the Sixties, to the unquiet La Brea Tar Pits at midnight, to a haunted sunken city off the coast of San Pedro seeking to rise again.

They may be old hands at dealing with the spirit world, but they have never been in a pursuit so deadly with the stakes so high. For, if a ghost-addicted Silicon Valley guru has his way, the lost souls of a million Angelenos could be drawn into the creation of a predatory World God guaranteed to bring about the end of life as we know it. And Vickery and Castine are all that stand between it and California-sized destruction.”

Forced Perspectives is the second of three tales featuring Vickery and Castine. Once again, author Tim Powers gives us another frenetic urban fantasy that blends Egyptian mythology, alternate Los Angeles history, and modern technology. One thing about Powers books is they can become a travelogue –all the locations, street and freeway names are real. One could navigate around LA using a Tim Powers book.

Anyways, if you like secret histories, like why Cecil B. DeMille really buried the Pharaoh’s Palace set after he filmed The Ten Commandments in 1923, stories filled with ghosts and Catholicism, and other supernatural high jinks, then this is the book for you! I felt the second book was a bit better than the first, the characters are fuller the set pieces more developed with Vickery seemly falling in love with Castine (though I’m not sure she is yet), but it does go on a bit too long. Still, Powers continues to bring a lot of weirdness with a ton of enjoyable quirks to this series. I’m still not wholly keen on this sub-genre, this Urban Fantasy arena, but at least I like these books.