The Strange Affair of Spring Heeled Jack by Mark Hodder
This book has many of the things I love: Steampunk, electricity, Spring-heeled Jack, werewolves, a mystery, time-travel affecting the present, and the implication of liminal space. It also has a glowing recommendation from Michael Moorcock on the back. Note to self: Do not buy any other book Michael Moorcock likes.
In theory, this book had all the elements that are right up my alley. There’s speculative fiction/alternative history, there’s steam punk aesthetics, there’s camp! In spite of all of the things it had going for it, it was an uninspired mess. It read more as some weird fan fiction of the Victorian era found in some dark corner of the internet than a book that people were expected to pay money for. (Sadly, I did pay money for this disappointment.) Sir Richard Francis Burton (of […]
I was getting really worried for this series. I did not like the last 2 volumes I read; I kinda hated book 5 which I read just before book 3 which wasn’t much better. The Rise of the Automated Aristocrats, Book 6, went back to what this series does right: Burton and Swinburne together with pals taking on weirdness, and the final conclusion is pretty satisfying, even though it end up feeling a little like the whole series was designed around the question of why […]
I read Expeditions to the Mountains of the Moon fifth even though it’s chronologically the third in the series. I’m not really sure it matters though since much of the time even the characters don’t know what’s going on, or remember what happened to them prior to the start of the particular book. This book basically takes Algy out of the picture for a lot of the story by having Burton hallucinate/travel back and forth between 1863 and 1914. Neither is a good time/place to […]
The first few books are fun historical fiction adventure, steampunk; I haven’t read book 3 yet, but 1 and 2 are pretty good. The 4th gets a little dark but remains mostly similar. This one gets dystopic and loses the fun. Nearly every major character is killed off and brought back as a plant, descendant, cyborg, or clone, or a combination of the above. It gets stupid and meaningless. Burton and Spring-heeled Jack are both back and neither one has a clear head. Jack can’t […]
