#Titanuary ‘Something More Than Night’ by Kim Newman

About the book…

Dulwich College, England 1904. A young Raymond Chandler meets an enthusiastic cricketer named Billy Pratt (later Boris Karloff). Sharing a sense of being outsiders at school, the two young men become friends and Chandler encourages Pratt to help him uncover the mystery of the housemaster’s strange wife and various disappearing objects. What the boys uncover will haunt them their whole lives…

Hollywood, USA, 1944. When a young actress names Eliza Dane, also Chandler’s mistress, turns up dead, in an apparent suicide having jumped from the Hollywood sign, Chandler realises he cannot escape his past. He seeks out his old friend and together they confront the terrible creature who entered their lives all those years ago.

Told with Newman’s trademark wit and intricate knowledge of the period, ‘Something More Than Night’ is a gripping and horrific tale and an engrossing dive into the thrilling era of wartime Hollywood.

I have to confess, that I did not read the back of this book before picking it up, that it was a new Kim Newman book was honestly good enough for me.

So it was a total thrill when I got to page location 185 (of the Kindle version ) and shouted out ‘My god it’s Boris Karloff!’ to the annoyance of my husband who was doing something far more important at the time. Ahem.

I am a huge fan of Karloff so this chance to ‘see’ him in action as himself , William Pratt, in the context of a hard boiled, noir-ish thriller was a pure joy.

It is no exaggeration to say that I ‘read’ it in black and white, the tone jumps effortlessly from page to your mind creating this incredible vista of 1930’s Hollywood, and, given Kim’s knowledge and expertise in this area, he is a fantastic guide down those mean streets.

The locked room mystery is mixed with Schrodinger-esque case of the woman in the trunk of a car who is both alive and dead.

And yet, when you think about it, it is not really that bizarre because if you can rationalise that Billy Pratt and Raymond Chandler, acting as his Philip Marlowe alter ego, then a woman who is both dead, and alive, is not that much of a stretch.

‘Cats love Billy. As do women. And small children he hasn’t drowned.’

Utilising an astonishing array of skills from the historical fiction perspective, the Hollywood movie world of the time and the burgeoning notion of film stars, Kim manages to create not only an engaging and intriguing mystery, in pairing up Pratt and Chandler -or Karloff and Marlowe- he brings forth interesting thoughts to this reader’s minds about the difference between creators, and their creations, and where they overlap like a Venn diagram.

For if Karloff is the creation of the much less sexily named Pratt, then surely some part of him must be the person he was before adopting that name. And the same for Chandler whose life is inextricably entwined with his famed detective.

There are element of the supernatrual strewn throughout the novel, and it does take you down some very dark alleyways, to the point where you feel like you want to say, ‘Hang on a minute, Kim, can you just slow down a tad please?’

But A) he doesn’t listen because, after all, you are in his world now and

B) you can always put down the book. It is difficult, yes, but entirely possible.

Another triumph, to my mind, I absolutely loved this vintage tinged mashup of genres and cannot recommend it highly enough.

About the author…

This author also writes under the pseudonym of Jack Yeovil.
An expert on horror and sci-fi cinema (his books of film criticism include ‘‘Nightmare Movies‘’ and ‘Millennium Movies’), Kim Newman’s novels draw promiscuously on the tropes of horror, sci-fi and fantasy. He is complexly and irreverently referential; the Dracula sequence–‘Anno Dracula‘, ‘The Bloody Red Baron’ and’ ‘Dracula Cha Cha Cha‘‘–not only portrays an alternate world in which the Count conquers Victorian Britain for a while, is the mastermind behind Germany’s air aces in World War One and survives into a jetset 1950s of paparazzi and La Dolce Vita, but does so with endless throwaway references that range from Kipling to James Bond, from Edgar Allen Poe to Patricia Highsmith.

In horror novels such as ‘Bad Dreams’ and ‘Jago’, reality turns out to be endlessly subverted by the powerfully malign. His pseudonymous novels, as Jack Yeovil, play elegant games with genre cliche–perhaps the best of these is the sword-and-sorcery novel ‘Drachenfels’ which takes the prescribed formulae of the games company to whose bible it was written and make them over entirely into a Kim Newman novel.
‘Life’s Lottery’ his most mainstream novel, consists of multiple choice fragments which enable readers to choose the hero’s fate and take him into horror, crime and sf storylines or into mundane reality.

Links-http://www.johnnyalucard.com/

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