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Tim Powers
(Head of Zeus, October, 2023)
Review by Jack Deighton
THE YORKSHIRE MOORS make an ideal setting for tales of the uncanny. A thin place. Remote, wild, desolate, atmospheric, and above all, wuthering. A world beyond the world. It is easy to imagine strange goings on, mysterious creatures, ghosts, hidden menace, inhabiting the landscape. But we don’t have to. The Brontë sisters (well, Emily) already did. And now, so too has Tim Powers in a story whose central focus is the Brontë family and Emily’s dog, Keeper, but also incorporates the author’s usual injections of weird. In particular here we have boggarts, gytrashes, barguests, (the latter two being essentially the same thing,) werewolves, a temple on the moors to the Roman goddess Minerva, double-bladed knives called dioscuri, an ancient creature with latent potency buried inside Haworth Church under a slab with an Ogham inscription. Not to mention clandestine human organisations known as the Oblique and the Huberti.
The prologue sees Branwell Brontë inveigling Emily and Anne along to a cave where they all leave smears of blood on the rocks. This acts as a primer for the subsequent plot, a debt to be called in. (I note again the prevalence of blood in these sorts of invocation.) Later, in his time in London, Branwell is bitten by a dog and more recently pricked by a dioscuri. Emily too has been bitten, though escaped the knife. But both are marked.
Their father Patrick’s great-grandfather, Hugh Brunty, had been on a boat crossing to Ireland when a child stowaway was found whom the crew said was a devil and wanted to throw overboard. Hugh saved the boy, who received the name Welsh (his believed origin) and adopted him. Welsh was a spirit and possessed Hugh, and later his son, but in the next generation Patrick’s father resisted possession, and with the help of his dog killed Welsh’s body but not its spirit. When Patrick (now Brontë) came to England the spirit followed him. It is to keep any such demons at bay that Patrick fires his gun at Howarth Church every morning.
Emily’s embroilment comes when, near a ruin called Ponden Kirk, she saves a man named Alcuin Curzon from a werewolf. He is one of the Huberti, working to prevent the Oblique reuniting the two halves of their biune god (one half being Welsh and the other the thing under the slab.) Emily in this tale is the strongest of the Brontë siblings and along with Keeper, whose ghost doppelgänger manifests itself when times are needful, is instrumental in the resolution.
Powers has form with incorporating literary figures in his work. Previous books of his have featured Lord Byron, the Rossettis, and William Ashbless, a poet of his own invention (with James Blaylock.) How much this convinces may depend on the reader’s knowledge of those characters’ backgrounds, but in My Brother’s Keeper there is too little of the Brontës as Brontës. It could of course be argued that in the context of the story Powers had little room for this, but while mention is made of the sisters’ initial book of poetry, the manuscript of Wuthering Heights being at a publisher and Branwell’s tendency to see himself as his fictional creation Northangerland, only once do we see the sisters sit down to write. (Branwell’s attempts to do so are depicted as futile, counterproductive and tainted by possession.) That the sisters’ work exists is, however, essential to the way Powers resolves the story and he gives us a supernatural—and also literal—explanation for the disease then called consumption, which in real life was to take both Emily and Anne.
All that aside, as a fantasy the novel is gripping and very well written, as is customary with Powers. Certainly not a chore to read.
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This issue’s Reviewers are:
Dave Brzeski is a lifelong fan of Fantasy, Science Fiction and Horror, who decided to try his hand at reviewing for the British Fantasy Society in 2011. Since then his reviews have also appeared in Occult Detective Quarterly/ Magazine, Skelos magazine, on John Linwood Grant’s GreyDogTales blog and the SF Crowsnest website. He is still not entirely sure how he came to co-edit and co-publish Occult Detective Magazine. He is often to be found in dark corners muttering about wanting his life back.
Gary Couzens has had reviews published in Black Static and online at Videovista, The Digital Fix and Cine Outsider. Stories have appeared in F & SF, Interzone, Black Static, and other magazines and anthologies, with two collections—Second Contact and Other Stories (Elastic Press, 2003, out of print) and Out Stack and Other Places (Midnight Street Press, 2015). A story was reprinted in Best British Science Fiction 2021, edited by Donna Scott (Newcon Press, 2022).
Born in 1945, Duncan Lunan has been a full-time author, researcher, lecturer, broadcaster, editor, critic and tutor since 1970, specialising in astronomy, spaceflight and science fiction. He has published 10 books to date and contributed to 42 more, with 42 published stories and over 1700 articles. He was science fiction critic of the Glasgow Herald from 1971 to 1985, his monthly astronomy column “The Sky Above You” appears in various newspapers and magazines, and he reviews SF for Interzone, Shoreline of Infinity, and ParSec, as well as non-fiction for Concatenation.
Jack Deighton is the author of the BSFA Award nominated novel A Son of the Rock plus shorter works of fiction. He has reviewed for Infinity Plus, been a regular reviewer for Interzone for twelve years and discusses books extensively on his blog at https://jackdeighton.co.uk/ .
When Andy Hedgecock and Drake the Staffie aren’t exploring abandoned railway lines and Iron Age earthworks, one of them writes for The Morning Star. Andy has also written for The Spectator, Penguin City Guides, Interzone, Black Static, Foundation, Oxford Companion to English Literature, and Short Fiction in Theory and Practice.
Juliet E. McKenna is a British fantasy author living in the Cotswolds, UK. Loving history, myth and other worlds since she first learned to read, she has written fifteen epic fantasy novels so far. The Green Man’s Heir was her first modern fantasy rooted in British folklore, followed by The Green Man’s Foe and The Green Man’s Silence. She writes diverse shorter stories enjoying forays into dark fantasy, steampunk and SF.
Donna Scott is a writer, editor, comedian, podcast presenter, storyteller, performance poet, and actor, originally from the Black Country, now living in Northampton. Her podcast, “The Lemonade Budget for Champagne Social Butterflies”, has been top ten in the Apple Stand-up podcast charts, and top-twenty in the all-time charts. She is a Director and former Chair of the British Science Fiction Association.
Kari Sperring is a novelist and academic, who has been a judge for the Arthur C. Clarke Award and the SF in Translation award. Her reviews have appeared in various magazines and journals, including Strange Horizons and Vector, and she was reviews editor for the latter 2008-09.
Nick Hubble is an academic and critic who lives in Aberystwyth. They have reviewed for publications including Strange Horizons and the Los Angeles Review of Books, and blogs at:
https://prospectiveculture.wordpress.com.