The Haunting of Alaizabel Cray
The airship lumbered low overhead, its long, lined belly a dull smear of silvery light in the fog as it reflected the gas lamps of the city beneath.
Despite the young and tender age of the author -- Chris Wooding is a fellow from the fine vintage of -77, this is good. Because of his age, I'm quite hesitant to go out looking for his older stuff. (As a friend of mine put it: "books published by twenty-year-old authors is almost always excrement.") However, this book made me curious.
London, sometime unknown but it is in the past. Crude phones, gaslight, magic rites, a murderer that puts Jack the Ripper in second place, and wyrd creatures that infest all major cities and live on their citizens. Thaniel Fox is a wyrd-hunter, just as his father, but when he meets Alaizabel Cray he stumbles into something far more sinister than the creatures he hunt.
It is a fun book, filled with an atmosphere that borrows both from gaslight romances and old horror movies. I liked it very much.
The Haunting of Alaizabel Cray
Scholastic Press
isbn 0-439-99896-4
Tuesday, 12 November 2002. 22:22
Fantasy 
notes in the margin (1)