Kate Griffin is a nom de plume for Catherine Webb, also known as Claire North, whose The First Fifteen Lives of Harry August was a fun read that was part of the contemporary many lives/multiverse subgenre that emerged in the early/mid-2010’s, along with Shining Girls, John Dies At the End, and a few others, and continues today. A Madness of Angels, a kind of magical thief / revenge / story, is an earlier work, and it is perhaps a little bit more of a writer experimenting than one that has landed–and at points, it asks a bit much of the reader, both structurally and conceptually. A 90 some page prologue is no longer a prologue, and to ask a reader for that amount of patience of the story, unless we’re in Gaddis land, is a bit much. Then there is the “we/I” conceit of the main character, who is possessed with a greater being, and sentence by sentence, for a reasonably long book, switches between the plural and singular first person pronoun. Then there is the strange lack of stakes. On the surface, the idea of a contemporary London gothic revenge story with elements of Gaiman-esque magic and sleuthing, should be quite fun, but the experiments distract, and by the end, it reveals itself to be more Harry Dresden dressed up with lit-lite word choices and specifics, than something of a true world. It really oddly recalls the Mel Gibson movie Payback in its linear “we get this, then that happens” – and if the editor and Griffin only were able to strip the rest of the artifice away, that may have a been a really diverting read, but as is, it was a bit tough.
File under: Your taste may vary
460p
If On a Winter's Night, a Traveler... 