Steven Savile is an international sensation, selling over half a million copies of his novels worldwide and writing for cult favorite television shows including Doctor Who, Torchwood, and Stargate. Now, he is finally making his US debut with Glass Town, a brilliantly composed novel revolving around the magic and mystery lurking in London.
GLASS TOWN
There’s always been magic in our world
We just needed to know where to look for it
In 1924, two brothers both loved Eleanor Raines, a promising young actress from the East End of London. She disappeared during the filming of Alfred Hitchcock’s debut, Number 13, which itself is now lost. It was the crime of the age, capturing the imagination of the city: the beautiful actress never seen again, and the gangster who disappeared the same day.
Generations have passed. Everyone involved is long dead. But even now their dark, twisted secret threatens to tear the city apart.
Joshua Raines is about to enter a world of macabre beauty, of glittering celluloid and the silver screen, of illusion and deception, of impossibly old gangsters and the fiendish creatures they command, and most frighteningly of all, of genuine magic.
He is about to enter Glass Town.
The generations-old obsession with Eleanor Raines’s unsolved case is about to become his obsession, handed down father-to-son through his bloodline like some unwanted inheritance. But first he needs to bury his grandfather and absorb the implications of the confession in his hand, a letter from one of the brothers, Isaiah, claiming to have seen the missing actress. The woman in the red dress hadn’t aged a day, no matter that it was 1994 and she’d been gone seventy years.
Long buried secrets cannot stay secrets forever. Hidden places cannot stay hidden forever.
The magic that destroyed one of the most brutal families in London’s dark history is finally failing, and Joshua Raines is about to discover that everything he dared dream of, everything he has ever feared, is waiting for him in Glass Town.
Review
Anyone who is a regular reader of my reviews will know that this book is way outside my usual reading material. But look at Savile’s resume so much great writing on so many great shows (and he wrote Slaine…. one of my all time fav 2000ad characters)… i mean… whats not to like.
The story, Glass Town story is an observational mix of London life, old fashioned east end underworld and the supernatural/ mystic providing a backdrop for the dark tale of family secrets and obsession. the author has a intimate grip and feel for the location and also both the periods of this book. But the real win is the characterization and observational descriptive in the book, it’s just excellent. At first i worried that the author was going to be a little windy in his descriptions, but very quickly i fell into the rhythm of the writing and found that rather than being too much the descriptive writing pulled me further into the plot and wrapped me tighter into the characters and the emotions that drove them.
The imagination behind the supernatural elements and the creatures that are conjured is just hugely impressive, but i should not be surprised for a man who wrote 2 Slaine books (serious… hero worship)… yeah he wrote a few other things as well… but Slaine!! sorry any way…..Glass Town, something fantastical, but yet written in such a way as to be highly believable and realistic.
Took me somewhere very new, and left me hugely impressed and as a dabbler at writing made me reassess my own descriptive writing.
Highly reccomended
(Parm)
1. Slaine the Exile (2006)
2. Slaine the Defiler (2007)
1. N.D.E. (2011)
1. Each Ember’s Ghost (2012)
4. Dead Ice (2014) (with David Wood)
The Dane Maddock Origins Omnibus 1 (omnibus) (2016)(with Rick Chesler, Sean Ellis and David Wood)
1. Stellaris (2016)
1. The Scepter of Xarbaal (2016)
2. Sands Of Darkness (2017)
3. Dragonbane (2017)
3. Winter’s Rage (2017)
Argo (2017)
Shining Ones (2017)
The Sufferer’s Song (2000)
Secret Life of Colors (2000)
Similar Monsters (2001)
Houdini’s Last Illusion (2004)
Angel Road (2004)
The Fragrance of You (2005)
Laughing Boy’s Shadow (2010)
Last Angel (2010)
The Black Chalice (2011)
Hallowed Ground (2011) (with David Niall Wilson)
London Macabre (2012)
Immortal (2014)
Moonlands (2015)
Ritual (2015) (with Albert Johnson)
Sunfail (2015)
Parallel Lines (2017)
Glass Town (2017)
Temple: Incarnations (2007)
eBooks at the Crossroad (2010) (with Ronald Kelly, Elizabeth Massie, Wayne Allen Sallee and David Niall Wilson)
The Forgetting Wood (2010)
Infinities (2011) (with Eric Brown, Garry Kilworth, Scott Nicholson, Kristine Kathryn Rusch and Anna Tambour)
Worlds Apart (2013) (with Jim Bernheimer, Lauren Harris, Matt Hilton, Laura Howard, Ashley Knight, Laura Bradley Rede, Liz Reinhardt, Aaron Rosenberg and David Wood)
Time’s Mistress (2014)
Crusader Kings II (2014) (with Scott Anderson, Lee Battersby, Luke Bean, Jordan Ellinger, James Erwin, Axel Kylander, Cory Lachance, James Mackie, M Harold Page, Aaron Rosenberg and Joseph Sharp)
Urban Enemies (2017) (with Kelley Armstrong, Amber Benson, Jim Butcher, Kevin Hearne, Caitlin Kittredge, Jonathan Maberry, Seanan McGuire, C E Murphy, Joseph Nassise, Lilith Saintcrow, Craig Schaefer, Jeff Somers, Carrie Vaughn, Jaye Wells and Sam Witt)
H.N.I.C. (2013) (with Albert Johnson)
King Wolf (2014)
S
1. Inheritance (2006)
2. Dominion (2006)
3. Retribution (2007)
Vampire Wars (omnibus) (2008)
Destination Prague (2007)
Curse of the Necrarch (2008)
Hidden (2008)
1. Shadow of the Jaguar (2008)
15. The Power Behind the Throne (2009)
1. Silver (2010)
2. Solomon’s Seal (2012) (with Steve Lockley)
3. Wargod (2012) (with Sean Ellis)
4. Lucifer’s Machine (2013) (with Rick Chesler)
5. Crucible (2014) (with Steve Lockley)
Ogmios (omnibus) (2013) (with Rick Chesler, Sean Ellisand Steve Lockley)
1. Tau Ceti (2011) (with Kevin J Anderson)
Stellar Guild Box Set One (omnibus) (2017) (with Kevin J Anderson, Eric Flint and Charles E Gannon)
1. Unlatched (2012)
The Sign of Glaaki (2013)
1. Embracing the Shadows (2015)
Murder at Sorrow’s Crown (2016)
Elemental (2006) (with Alethis Kontis)
Scaremongers 2 (1998)
