Two Novels, with Vampires

As a diversion from banging on about my own books, here are some thoughts about some other people's.

Firstly, To the Devil - a Diva! by Paul Magrs, which I've mentioned previously, and which I finished over the weekend. This is quite lovely, although the acerbic treatment of SF fans may give some of Paul's readers pause. (Possibly Magrs, as a successful mainstream writer who's also produced Doctor Who novels, had some things he wanted to get off his chest.)

Given that the whole novel reeks of intellectual nerddom, though, I don't think it can have been too heartfelt. Magrs has described Doctor Who as a vehicle for trans-genre migration, opening up doors between all kinds of normally isolated fictive spaces and allowing them to meet. Since his ultimate deconstruction of Who itself in Mad Dogs and Englishmen, his own work (which started off in a rather restrained and gritty magic realism) has turned this meeting-space into a cross-genre particle accelerator, throwing together radically different elements and combining them, in order to see what exotic kinds of matter are created.

The present-day story of TtD-AD! (and don't you love titles with that much punctuation?) incorporates elements from Hammer horror films, Buffy the Vampire Slayer and Queer as Folk, as well as what I suspect are gay soap operas I don't even know about. Throughout the novel there's a devoted (and, yes, fannish) love for all that's camp and schlocky in British horror: there are even flashback sequences which take the pulp-horror motif back to its mid-twentieth century roots in the work of Dennis Wheatley; with a guest appearance by the C.S. Lewis character Magrs created for Mad Dogs, Professor Cleavis, who of course is not at all in favour of all the satanic goings-on.

On top of all this -- and perhaps most importantly, as it would be very easy to get lost in all these pomo-porno-pyrotechnics -- TtD-aD! is a novel that deals with human feelings, with love and family and with the very real phenomenon of the emotional vampire: a "friend" whose parasitic love does nothing but drain their victim dry. On this point incidentally (if few others), Magrs and the original Lewis would have been entirely in agreement.

Since finishing the Magrs novel, I've embarked on The Dragon Waiting by John M. Ford, a retelling of Shakespeare's Richard III in a fantasy setting. This also has vampires in it, and wizards, but that's not so much the aspect that interests me.

The Dragon Waiting is also an alternative history, one where (by the convention of these things) things such as the Wars of the Roses and the geneaology of the English royal family are much the same as in our familiar history, but where Christianity never became the official faith of the Roman Empire, and as a consequence Byzantium still rules the majority of an entirely pagan Europe. There are even brief hints (if I'm not misreading certain references to a god of carpentry named "Esus") that Christianity was simply assimilated into the Religio Romana.

The novel's well-written and involving, but it's the setting that I'm really enjoying. (It makes up for the wizardry, which to be honest I often find a bit tedious in fiction.) I love alternative histories, especially ones which have been thoroughly thought through, and it's the little details that make this novel such a joy: the pagan Pantheons taking the place of the cathedrals in Byzantium and Florence, Dante's poem of descent into the Underworld, the Commedia dell'Uomo, throwaway references to the early discoveries of the New World and Copernican cosmology, and the revelation that Richard the Lionheart fought side-by-side with a Zoroastrian Saladin as brothers in arms.

I'm not far into this novel yet, so there's a great deal still to discover about the world it's set in. But it's a fantastically detailed and layered construction, set with glittering jewels, and it's quite beautful.