Pop-culture icons team up to fight crimes Borneo Bulletin Online – Borneo Bulletin Online

Bill Sheehan

THE WASHINGTON POST For more than 30 years, Britains Kim Newman has been producing thoroughly entertaining, startlingly original fiction. He has remained something of a cult figure on both sides of the Atlantic, but that situation could and should change with the publication of his immersive new horror thriller, Something More Than Night.

For readers unfamiliar with Newmans work, here are some points worth noting. First, much of that work takes place within a coherent fictional universe in which a large cast of revolving characters moves freely from one story to another. Something More Than Night is a wholly independent narrative, but it, too, contains echoes and reflections of the authors earlier fiction.

Second, Newmans narratives are steeped in the large and small details of popular culture the books, TV shows and movies that have influenced us all. His magnum opus is the multivolume Anno Dracula series, which takes Bram Stokers original novel and turns it on its head, positing a world in which Stokers vampire-hunting heroes failed to destroy Count Dracula, ushering in a bizarre new future in which vampirism runs rampant.

The series is both ingenious and utterly addictive.

Youve never read anything quite like it.

The same can be said of Newmans latest. Though smaller in scale than the Anno Dracula novels, it is equally clever and equally indebted to popular culture. The story takes place in Los Angeles in the late 30s.

The protagonists are an unlikely pair who came to prominence during that era: RT (mystery novelist Raymond Chandler) and Billy (aka William Pratt, better known as Frankenstein actor Boris Karloff). In Newmans version, these men who never met in real life share a common history. Both are English public school men who met on the cricket pitch at Dulwich College.

Both, in their youth, were touched by an agent of the supernatural. That touch marked them for life and precipitated a series of paranormal adventures only hinted at here. The latest of these adventures forms the substance of Something More Than Night.

The story begins with a phone call in the middle of the night, as Chandler and Karloff are summoned to an apparent homicide at the Santa Monica Pier. The scene has been staged to resemble a similar murder from Chandlers debut novel, The Big Sleep. But this victims face has been obliterated with a shotgun, making this a far grislier murder than anything Chandler ever devised. The crime, Karloff notes, brings the separate worlds of Mystery and Horror together. As the narrative proceeds, Horror will soon become the dominant element.

The victim is quickly identified as Joh Devlin, private investigator, pulp fiction writer and partial model for Chandlers iconic detective, Philip Marlowe. Three years earlier, the trio had investigated a sensational incident that came to be known as The Home House mystery: Ward Home Jr, wealthy head of Pyramid Pictures, was seen running from his home engulfed in flames, then disappeared into the night. The case became the focus of intense public scrutiny, but the details of what happened were never revealed.

What Chandler discovers in the basement of Home House takes him far from Marlowes familiar world of cheap hoods, crooked cops and dangerous dames, and into a world that Karloff might call home.

Following the trail of the burning man back to its source, the three detectives encounter a literal mad scientists lab that bears a distinct resemblance to the one in which the Frankenstein monster came to life in James Whales classic film.

Suspended within electrified devices mounted on the wall are four people only one of them still living.

All were participants in a Promethean experiment aimed at extending the human life span.

That mad quest for immortality is only one thread in an intricate narrative that encompasses witchcraft, impossible transformations, hairbreadth escapes, killer clowns and an assortment of innovative murders.

My favourite: death by means of a poisoned pie-in-the-face. Slapstick comedy and supernatural terror are a hard combination to bring off. Newman makes it look easy.

Beneath the Gothic extravagance of its plot, the books success rests on a foundation of seamlessly integrated research and convincing, empathetic characterisations. Newmans Karloff is a vulnerable, thoroughly decent figure who will go through many changes and emerge more human than before.

Chandler, our narrator and reluctant hero, is a man with a history of hard drinking and a penchant for womanising. He has been shaped, in large part, by his experience as an English public school man and is haunted by indelible memories of the Great War. In a clear, level voice, he guides us through a midnight world that is darker and infinitely stranger than his own literary imaginings. It is a journey well worth taking.

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Pop-culture icons team up to fight crimes Borneo Bulletin Online - Borneo Bulletin Online