Nominally science fiction, this early Tim Powers novel is better classified as rationalized fantasy. In place of the hero traversing a demon-haunted landscape to rescue his lady fair from a vile sorcerer, we have him in post-nuclear war Southern California seeking to extricate a long-ago girl friend from a weird religious cult. The urban-gothic setting and grotesque fauna are inventive, the characters a bit paint-by-the-numbers, the climax one of the strangest banquets in literary history. For almost any other writer, this book would be a career-crowning achievement; for Powers, it is only average. ( )

One of Powers' most sustainedly bizarre novels; tremendously engaging. ( )

http://www.leftfield.org/~rawdon/book... ( )

I'm glad I read this book, but not so glad that I'm going to go around grabbing ya'll by the collars demanding YOU read it. It has a fairly bog-standard dystopian setting complete with irritating linguistic fillips. It also has the Derleth pox, which is what happens when a Catholic writer is influenced by the Cthulhu mythos, but happily a non-fatal case. I also thought I caught a reference to my least-favorite scene in A Canticle for Leibowitz. And the handling of the female characters is weak - additionally, odd, semi-cosmic gender issues with regard to the Big Baddy's evil powers are brought up and then dropped, never to reappear even when they logically should.

Now, all that quibbling quibbled, it definitely has some interesting stuff going on, including a fairly coherent evil scheme as evil schemes in sf go and a protagonist that I found pretty likeable despite his constant protestations of unlikeability (see also: reference to Catholic writers above.) But, if you've not read Powers before, I would recommend The Drawing of the Dark or Last Call above this. ( )

Early Tim Powers, in a sort of not-to-distant future, which seems to be an unusual setting for him, but one he does very well. Theres something very appealing about this book, that almost makes you wnat to go out and find your own vampirous haemogoblin. The hero is quite vile and the ending is quite downbeat for a change ( )