![]() Note that these stories can be read and enjoyed without benefit of having read the author’s “Anno Dracula” series of alternate history novels, even though the Diogenes Club plays a prominent role in those books.Įxcellent story collection featuring the exploits of Richard Jeperson of the Diogenes Club. But as long as you can hang in there, these stories can be a real treat. At times this becomes overbearing and made me feel a bit lost, like I was missing a few too many inside jokes. Newman’s writing style runs more toward the clever turn of phrase as opposed to clarity, concentrating more on colorful commentary through dialog at the expense of traditional storytelling. ![]() A handy glossary is included at the back of the book which identifies all of the “Britishisms” for those Americans that might feel lost in some of the slang. ![]() I can always count on Kim Newman to bring interesting plots. I enjoyed most of these stories, although they tend to be more of novella length than short story length. Most occur during the 1970s, which is a nice change from the usual late 19th century settings for these types of books. This collection of 10 stories features psychic investigator Richard Jeperson and friends as they pursue the mission of the Club. Founded by Sherlock Holmes’s cleverer brother Mycroft, the Club protects the realm – and this entire plane of existence – from occult menaces, threats born in other dimensions, magical perfidy and the Deep Dark Deadly Ones. Life's Lottery, his most mainstream novel, consists of multiple choice fragments which enable readers to choose the hero's fate and take him into horror, crime and sf storylines or into mundane reality.įrom the 1860s to the present day, the Diogenes Club has been the least-known of Great Britain’s intelligence and law enforcement services. His pseudonymous novels, as Jack Yeovil, play elegant games with genre cliche-perhaps the best of these is the sword-and-sorcery novel Drachenfels which takes the prescribed formulae of the games company to whose bible it was written and make them over entirely into a Kim Newman novel. In horror novels such as Bad Dreams and Jago, reality turns out to be endlessly subverted by the powerfully malign. He is complexly and irreverently referential the Dracula sequence-Anno Dracula, The Bloody Red Baron and Dracula,Cha Cha Cha-not only portrays an alternate world in which the Count conquers Victorian Britain for a while, is the mastermind behind Germany's air aces in World War One and survives into a jetset 1950s of paparazzi and La Dolce Vita, but does so with endless throwaway references that range from Kipling to James Bond, from Edgar Allen Poe to Patricia Highsmith. ![]() Note: This author also writes under the pseudonym of Jack Yeovil.Īn expert on horror and sci-fi cinema (his books of film criticism include Nightmare Movies and Millennium Movies), Kim Newman's novels draw promiscuously on the tropes of horror, sci-fi and fantasy. ![]()
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