Reading my latest Tim Powers, Declare (2001), winner of the International Horror Guild Award and World Fantasy Awards for Best Novel, I'm finding it a little tricky to explain how much I enjoyed this book.
Focusing on spies in Britain and Russia during the Cold War, and taking place just after the second world war and in the early sixties, the book takes a number of real world events and people and weaves around them a story filled with dark magic and a pretty terrifying concept for the dominance of the USSR during the period.
Although Powers novels are filled with a large cast of characters, different timelines and convoluted plots, I found this book (which has all three of those aspects) moved at a really great pace and put me in mind of the spy fiction of John Le Carré.
The story works as most great spy novels do, with intrigue, sadness, and a large focus on past events and cause and effect. A really great book and one I'll definitely be looking to add to my shelves in future.
For years now I've been reading my way through two separate horror lists - The Bram Stoker Awards for best novel and the titles in Kim Newman's Horror: The 100 Best Books. Both of these have been a great way to read books I may not have heard of before and introduce me to all sorts of new authors. Then last year I came across an entirely new one - The International Horror Guild Award, which ran for fourteen years from 1995 - 2008. Although I had read a few books off the best novel list There were more than ten I had never heard of, which lead me to today's book The 37th Mandala by Marc Laidlaw.
The book is really great - starting with a terrifying incident in Cambodia and then quickly moving on to a new age author named Derek Crowe at an author signing. A big part of what I liked about the book was the slow build up to the reveals - the story and characters get laid out first before anything really awful happens and then the narrative begins building momentum like a snowball to an avalanche, which a payoff that actually hit Lovecraft levels for me.
A fantastic read about the dangers of blind faith and importance of responsibility to others.
Strongly Recommended.
