Paul Magrs

This is out quite soon: George Mann’s new novel, set in a different time and place – though ostensibly the same universe as – his Newbury and Hobbes steampunk books. This time we’re in Jazz Age New York with gangsters and cabaret singers and Long Island millionaires who throw parties for strangers for the sheer hell of it. It’s a murky tale of ritualized murder and oddly pristine Roman relics…

I should introduce Spoiler Space…

The concept is blindingly brilliant and deceptively simple. It’s The Great Gatsby meets Bob Kane’s original Batman. Between throwing his grand, nihilistic parties on Long Island, our millionaire glamourpuss Gabriel Cross dons trenchcoat, fedora, and red-glowing goggles and seeks to provide vigilante justice high above the rooftops of Manhattan. He metes out death in startlingly violent scenes (though he never shoots first) and thunders about the Art Deco skyline on his jet-powered boots. This first adventure sees him up against the Mob and a crazed killer known only as The Roman. Things become personal pretty quickly for our impassive anti-hero, as his cabaret singer girlfriend Celeste gets kidnapped, and he realises that she is somehow deeply implicated in the peculiar backstory of his nemesis.

This is great melodramatic stuff, with lots of secondary characters and amazing action sequences. I think the fights and air battles and car chases are a particular triumph here. Mann’s writing is direct, clean and punchy. I love all the world-weary whisky-slugging and Jimmy Cagney-type dialogue.

Then, just when we’re feeling cosy with the familiarity of the elements we get some mention of coal furnace-powered cars or communication by hologram or the ongoing war with England… and we’re reminded that we’re in an offshoot of Mann’s invented Steampunk universe here.

An uncanny rather than cosy place to be. Uncosy should be the word for it, I think: when the sampling of tropes from popular fiction becomes unsettling and disquieting…

When the Ghost – our grim-faced hero – teams up with Donovan, the cop, I was reminded of my favourite era of the Batman comics: early 80s, when Gene Colan drew the strip. His darkly smoky, photo-realist style really fits the New York that Mann creates here.

Most startlingly, the climax of the book takes us into a very strange place indeed… hinting at a larger backstory to do with otherworldly creatures that Gabriel has encountered before, in France, during the Great War. When we see the tentacled beasties here, trying to break through into our dimension, it’s like the book has flung open a portal into HP Lovecraft’s arcane world, for just the brief, bloodthirsty climax of the book. I was in heaven: Scott Fitzgerald meets DC Comics meets Lovecraft’s mysterious monsters – slugging it out in Twenties New York. I mean, where else do you get a fabulous combination like that..?