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Doris V. Sutherland
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Doris V. Sutherland
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Doctor Who: The New Adventures of Bernice Summerfield, Vol. 5: Buried Memories
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Alyson Leeds (Goodreads Author),
Doris V. Sutherland (Goodreads Author),
4.14 avg rating — 70 ratings
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2019
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Doctor Who: Redacted: Series 1
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Doctor Who: The Eleventh Doctor Chronicles, Volume 2
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Doris V. Sutherland (Goodreads Author),
3.72 avg rating — 54 ratings
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2021
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2 editions
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Doctor Who: Redacted 8. Ghosts
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Doris V. Sutherland (Goodreads Author),
Juno Dawson (Goodreads Author),
4.19 avg rating — 37 ratings
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2022
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Bernice Summerfield: In Time
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Xanna Eve Chown (Editor),
Doris V. Sutherland (Goodreads Author)
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2018
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The Omega Factor: Divinity
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2020
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Survivors: Crusade
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2022
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Dracula Beyond Stoker Issue 5: Arthur, Quincey, and Jack
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The Evolving Dead (Doctor Who: The Eleventh Doctor Chronicles, Volume 2, #1)
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The Mummy
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Doris Sutherland
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This is a brisk, accessible sort of book, offering short and informal profiles on a variety of mythical figures. Apollo and Patroclus are here, as are Gilgamesh and Enkidu; alongside these obvious candidates are more surprising characters such as Zeu
This is a brisk, accessible sort of book, offering short and informal profiles on a variety of mythical figures. Apollo and Patroclus are here, as are Gilgamesh and Enkidu; alongside these obvious candidates are more surprising characters such as Zeus, Odin, Robin Hood and Sir Lancelot. Each time, author Dan Jones does a convincing job arguing his thesis that the subject can be counted as in some way LGBT. I'll admit to being skeptical, at first, about the decision to include contemporary pop culture characters like Xena, Lestat and Doctor Who, but the book does much to justify this choice. A significant aspect of Dan Jones' approach is to examine how each figure has been re-interpreted over the ages: for example, the chapter on Pan discusses his role in turn-of-the-century weird fiction (Machen's The Great God Pan, Benson's The Man Who Went Too Far) and films like Pan's Labyrinth; the Apollo chapter looks at homoerotic imagery in Renaissance art; the chapter on the Inuit goddess Sedna covers Haruna Lee's 2014 play War Lesbian; and so on. Given this angle, I think it makes perfect sense to include a few chapters which reverse the process, picking out a modern character and discussing them in the context of their mythical antecedents. Not all of the book's points of comparison are based on direct adaptations. Jones brings up Baubo, a comparatively obscure Greek goddess who (according to one story) flashed her nether regions at Persephone, as a springboard to discuss the roles of nudity and exhibitionism in contemporary feminist protests. On a more whimsical level, the chapter on Hermaphroditus concludes with an excerpt from the Spice Girls' "2 Become One". I appreciated the author's playful attitude towards myth as a concept, with a number of chapters probing how history can become story. One chapter is focused on Niankhkhnum and Khnumhotep; these were not mythical figures, in the strict sense, but rather a pair of ancient Egyptian men whose shared tomb includes a mural of the two embracing. A number of theories exist to explain the dual burial of the two men, who could conceivably have been anything from lovers to conjoined twins: the myths here, then, are modern attempts to write the pair's story. Elsewhere, we find chapters on the Order of Chaeronea, the Daughters of Bilitis and the Minoan Brotherhood, which -- despite their classically-inspired names -- were actually twentieth-century gay rights organisations, blazing new trails while simultaneously keeping very old flames alive. Jones does a commendable job of avoiding repetition or fluffy speculation, finding a new topic to discuss in each of his edge-case chapters. The chapter on Horus and Set is a case study in how a specific narrative can be queered or straightened out in accordance with the dominant culture. The Zelda chapter focuses on what happens when a significant chunk of the audience interprets a character as queer, despite official denials from the creator (or rights-holders). The Wild Things chapter is really a three-page biography of Maurice Sendak, examining his most beloved children's book in relation to his life as a gay Jewish New Yorker. The book isn't a scholarly one; there's no index or bibliography, or even a recommended reading list beyond the various titles mentioned in the text itself. If you're already a scholar of mythology, perhaps round this review down to three stars: the book isn't especially substantial, but it's a fun bit of confectionary that'll likely introduce you to a few new things. The ideal readership, though, is a more casual reader who's just starting to dig into world mythology beyond Chris Hemsworth films; and if you fit that bill, then Queer Heroes of Myth and Legend warrants a solid four stars. ...more |
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Jul 13, 2026 03:08AM
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Declan Finn is an author I’ve come to think of as the MAGA Garth Marenghi. He specialises in churned-out horror/urban fantasy novels that, in purely formalistic terms, are about what I’d expect from a sub-par Jim Butcher wannabe. What makes Finn stan
Declan Finn is an author I’ve come to think of as the MAGA Garth Marenghi. He specialises in churned-out horror/urban fantasy novels that, in purely formalistic terms, are about what I’d expect from a sub-par Jim Butcher wannabe. What makes Finn stand out is how, despite his online claims to be against authors who lecture readers, he insists on inserting his hard-right political ideology into his stories. The results are, like the work of Jack Chick or Ben Garrison, perversely fascinating. City of Shadows is the fourth book in a series of novels about Thomas “Saint Tommy” Nolan, an NYPD detective who has been granted miracle-working powers by God. The first three books were set in New York, where Nolan went up against the diabolical forces of the Women’s Health Corps (a fictional stand-in for Planned Parenthood) and the nefarious Mayor Hoynes (who, being a Democrat, was only able to gain power by making a pact with Satan.) His demon-busting antics in his home city have sufficiently impressed higher-ups in the Vatican that he’s now receiving job offers overseas: in this book, he’s sent to London to investigate the theft of a supernatural artifact called the Soul Stone from the British Museum. The story hinges on the premise that the Church of England is a secretly atheistic organisation which uses the veneer of religion simply to control the masses. But that control is now weakening as Anglicanism loses ground to the true faith of Roman Catholicism. Among the atheistic puppet-masters are the novel’s two main villains, Lord Newby Fowler and Dame Polly Toynbee (the latter, bizarrely, appears to have been named after a Guardian columnist, and I can only imagine what the real Polly Toynbee would have to say about her inclusion in this unhinged narrative). These godless aristocrats are deeply concerned that even the royals might someday go Catholic (“the Royal family might actually make us give back everything that our ancestors stole from the Catholic church over 500 years ago” says Toynbee) and so have taken desperate measures: they’ve given the Soul Stone to an Islamic hate-preacher, hoping that he and his flock will use its powers to destroy all of London, taking the royals with it. The evil imam, incidentally, is named Abu Hamza Kozbar. Again, Finn appears to be borrowing the names of real people; in this case, Abu Hamza al-Masri and Mohammed Kozbar. The former is a notorious hate-preacher and convicted terrorist; the latter… isn’t. Because the Anglican conspiracy isn’t exposed until the climax, the novel spends much of its time stirring up hatred of Muslims, who are portrayed as so violent that a person can barely walk down a street in London without being attacked. The story’s general standpoint is summarised by this early dialogue from Father Pearson, Nolan’s British liaison: ‘“Knife attacks are up. Violent crime is up. The mayor wants to ban any and all knives in the city, but carry acid? That’s a-okay!” His bright, cheery tone faded and grew cynical. “But carrying around containers of acid? That’s just ducky. Nearly five hundred acid attacks a year, but why not? [...] It doesn’t help that our mayor is a Muslim communist…”’ Now for a reality check. Yes, it’s true that, according to Metropolitan Police statistics, acid attacks in London rose through most of the 2010s, peaking in 2017 when there were 471 such attacks reported. Mayor Sadiq Khan (the “Muslim communist” referred to here) responded that same year by calling for a zero-tolerance approach to the issue and for restrictions on the sale of cleaning products that could be used as offensive weapons. After this, London saw a steady decline in acid attacks, with only 76 being recorded in 2024. Granted, City of Shadows was published in 2019, when the extent of the decline was not yet obvious. Even so, it would have been clear by then that the novel was wildly inaccurate in depicting Sadiq Khan just sitting around doing nothing while the city collapses into scenes that are best described as a Fox News version of that one Simpsons skit with the Cockney hooligans: ‘The male victim was given a hard shove, into a wall next to the girl. Three of the men peeled off to confront me. Two stayed with the girl, and a third stayed with the male. I must not have looked like much. I wore a button down shirt, navy blue blazer, and a light overcoat. It was technically summer, but it was still England. They were a half-dozen young, strong … Middle Eastern men. When Pearson said that there were a lot of these attacks, he wasn’t kidding. “You pricks deaf?” I barked when I was only twenty feet away and closing. “What do you think you’re doing?” The one in the middle said, “Oi. I think you’re in the wrong neighborhood, mate. Shouldn’t you be somewhere posh?” Even though the one in the middle spoke, my eyes were on the one on the right, trying to circle out to the curb. He had a white plastic bottle in his hand, held low and almost entirely behind his thigh. Acid attacks. Nearly five hundred a year.’ Absurdly, this altercation takes place in Bloomsbury, literally around the corner from the British Museum. Why a blue-collar New Yorker would be seen as too “posh” for this location is unclear. The novel’s portrayal of its two evil liberal atheist villains is similarly ludicrous. Just look at this dialogue: ‘“I presume you’re both atheists?” I asked. Fowler laughed. “Of course we are. We are educated, after all.” Toynbee smiled at me and added, “It is so nice to find another educated man. They’re the only ones to talk to. Better than workmen. They seem to all think that news is all propaganda and skips the leading articles. A workman buys a paper for football results and little paragraphs about girls falling out of windows and corpses found in flats.” Fowler shook his head and sighed. “True. They are a problem. We will have to recondition him eventually. But the educated public, the people who read the high-brow weeklies, don’t need reconditioning. They're all right already. They'll believe whatever the papers print, after all.”’ In a recurring tic that goes back to the first book in the series, Finn works on the assumption that anyone who supports the gay community must, by definition, be a paedophile apologist. “Your ‘pro-gay’ support is all about sleeping with children”, says Nolan to Fowler and Toynbee, prompting the evil atheists to begin spouting NAMBLA talking points. We also learn that the two villains have a history of “slipping money to the Rotherham sex slave ring.” That the local authorities in Rotherham covered up the decades-long activities of sex trafficking gangs is a matter of record; the notion that such gangs were being deliberately financed by peers of the realm, however, appears to have sprung from Finn’s fertile imagination. (The fact that he called one of the culprits “Polly Toynbee” might constitute defamation of character.) As for Toynbee and Fowler’s views on immigration, these are summed up as follows: ‘Being pro-refugee and -immigration wasn’t about every refugee and immigrant—only Muslims. If a refugee or immigrant was Buddhist, Kurd, Christian, white or Tibetan, then they were just flat out of luck. They had actively campaigned against allowing non-Muslims out of the Middle East, and those were the groups being annihilated.’ Who, exactly, is being satirised here? Can you point me to anyone, anywhere on the political spectrum, who supports Muslim immigration but is opposed to non-Muslim immigration? And if Toynbee and Fowler support Muslims, then why are they against Kurds? Is Finn simply unaware that the Kurds are a predominantly Muslim people? That wouldn’t surprise me, to be honest. The novel uses the terms “Muslim”, “Arab” and “Middle Easterner” more-or-less interchangeably, despite London’s Muslim population being overwhelmingly Indian, Pakistani and Bangladeshi. This sort of cultural and geographic cluelessness is entirely typical of Finn: the previous book in the series, Infernal Affairs, had an evil Voodoo magician whose accent varied from Haitian to Jamaican between chapters, Finn apparently being unaware that Haiti and Jamaica are different places. The author’s difficulty in writing credible portrayals of people who don’t share his political views extends to the conservative characters. Pearson, the British priest, just happens to agree with Nolan on all ideological points – right down to his belief that the UK should adopt an American-style right to bear arms, despite this being a fringe position in Britain. A buddy-cop team-up between an American conservative and a British conservative, with the ideological distinctions that come with this, might have been halfway interesting; but instead we get two Declan Finn sock-puppets, one saying “butt” while the other says “bum”. And, really, the book’s just not very well-written. The dialogue is peppered with repetitive action beats of the “he frowned” and “I arched a brow” variety (the latter being used ten times). We get tiresome pop-culture references, Finn having yet to realise that, if your story involves baddies stealing a supernatural artifact, the reader will notice the resemblance to Indiana Jones without the narrator pointing it out. We also get some rather petty swipes at other writers. In one scene, Nolan complains that too many urban fantasy novels include “bisexual group sex with were-furries”, as though such material would somehow have made City of Shadows any worse. Elsewhere, he condemns Dan Brown for peddling bigoted propaganda in the guise of writing thrillers. And they say Americans have no grasp of irony. It’s also bad at being urban fantasy, a genre capable of much more. Take Jim Butcher’s Dresden Files, which Finn is so desperately trying to ape. In one of those books, the city is attacked by a necromancer who’s raised an army of the dead. Protagonist Harry Dresden realises that the only way to fight back is by obtaining some undead henchmen of his own; but as a good wizard, he’s forbidden from raising dead people. He solves the issue by exploiting a loophole: while he can’t raise dead *people*, there’s nothing stopping him from popping round the museum and animating some dinosaur skeletons. That’s not even an especially inspired concept. It’s about the bare minimum of invention I’d expect from a story of this sort. Yet it’s streets ahead of anything Finn comes up with. Reading City of Shadows is like reading a description of a video game, the plot points divided up by sloggy action scenes in which Nolan plows through hordes of mooks. Worse, it’s a video game with only three enemy types. One, Muslims with acid; two, Muslims who’ve received laser-vision and other generic superpowers from the Soul Stone (Nolan nicknames these after X-Men characters, just to drive home the unoriginality); three, sentient shadows that never pose much of a threat. And how does Nolan fight off these foes? With the same miraculous powers he’s been using since the series began: bilocation and levitation, both of which have grown seriously stale. The high concept here is that Nolan has been granted abilities attributed to Catholic saints; but is there any theological reason why he can’t be given a few more by this point? Perhaps he could’ve used St. Brigid’s expanding cloak like the giant cellophane “S” in Superman II. A couple of fetching ideas turn up, only to be squandered. At one point, Nolan phones his wife; a demon interferes with the line to make him think she’s breaking up with him. This had potential – imagine if Nolan spent his deadly trip to London convinced that his family was falling apart back home – but the truth gets established so quickly as to render the whole affair pointless. Similarly anticlimactic is the appearance of three angels, who pop up in It’s a Wonderful Life-style modern guises, send the evil imam to hell, and then vanish again. There’s precisely one sequence that shows any real invention, and the result is utterly, hilariously stupid. Nolan confronts the evil aristocrats in Toynbee Tower, and when their jihadi heavies turn up, it looks like all is lost… but then some explosions go off, taking out the baddies. Nolan then reveals to the reader that, earlier on, he took the precaution of placing bombs on the building’s exterior; to avoid harming any innocents on the lower floors, he levitated up the walls and put the explosives on a high story. And where did he get the bombs? Simple: he recruited “every altar boy, deacon, and volunteer at the Westminster Cathedral to assemble aluminum tape, iron oxide and magnesium together in the right formula”. Really, it’s criminal that Finn allowed this chain of events to occur off-page. I can only imagine how the dialogue would’ve run: “Excuse me, Archbishop. I don’t suppose you could help me stage an arson campaign against the residence of Polly Toynbee? Don’t worry, I’m only blowing up one of the high floors.” “Certainly, sir. Wait, hold on, how are you going to get the bombs up there without being seen?” “It's okay, God’s given me the power to levitate up the side of the building.” “Oh, right, that makes sense. I’ll get the altar boys to fetch you some iron oxide.” Astonishingly, even after every member of Westminster Cathedral has become complicit in Nolan’s arson campaign, nobody goes to prison – despite the godless bureaucrats of the London Met having it in for Nolan. I realise that Finn has a low opinion of police competence in Britain, but really? If you’d like a second opinion on the merit of Finn’s writing, here’s a rather telling comment from Russell Newquist, who published City of Shadows: ‘My wife and I had to explain to him [Declan Finn] why certain scenes in the earlier drafts of his books didn’t work… and he just wasn’t getting it. He really and truly doesn’t understand this stuff.’ Having suffered through the published version of City of Shadows, I can only shudder to contemplate those earlier drafts. ...more |
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Anyone who gives this book a favourable rating knows nothing about the subject. The Supernatural World of the Anglo-Saxons: Gods, Folklore and the Pagan Roots of Christmas and Halloween is an utterly irredeemable piece of work, one that would've been Anyone who gives this book a favourable rating knows nothing about the subject. The Supernatural World of the Anglo-Saxons: Gods, Folklore and the Pagan Roots of Christmas and Halloween is an utterly irredeemable piece of work, one that would've been rightly shredded to oblivion had it undergone any sort of peer review. It has so many flaws that I'm honestly unsure where to start. S. A. Swaffington claims that the word “fairy” is derived from Old English (no: it’s French in origin). He includes sections on gremlins and the Beast of Bodmin Moor, despite the fact that these are beings of twentieth-century folklore. He claims that the word “puke” is etymologically derived from the name of Puck, the fairy immortalised by Shakespeare; I can find no other source even suggesting a connection. He says that a king named Henry XIII was on the throne in 1542. He claims that the story of Snow White dates back to the Middle Ages, and then goes on to describe a theory that the title character was based on Margarete von Waldeck – who was born in 1533, after the Middle Ages. He claims, wrongly, that holly takes its name from the word “holy”. He states, as accepted fact, that Herne the Hunter (an antlered ghost in Shakespeare’s Merry Wives of Windsor) is derived from Odin – hypothetically possible, but not necessarily true. Vortigern’s recruitment of Hengist and Horsa is treated as a genuine historical event, rather than a legendary narrative involving personages who may never have existed. He quotes excerpts from his own novel Offa: Rise of the Englisc Warrior as though it's an actual historical text. And so on, and so on. Even the images are suspect. The book’s section on Rawhead and Bloody-Bones has a picture that looked, to me, like a modern children’s book illustration. I did the legwork online and found that the drawing was by Andrew L. Paciorek – but Swaffington didn’t bother to credit him. Did he even get permission to use the art, I wonder? If you want a clear illustration of Swaffington’s low standards of research, just look at this: "Orcs are best known from The Lord of the Rings by J. R. R. Tolkien, but Tolkien didn’t invent them. The term ‘Orc’ is Old English, meaning foreigner, monster, or demon […] Interestingly, when the Normans conquered England in 1066, the English referred to their conquerors as Orcs." There is absolutely no evidence that the word “orc” was ever used to describe Normans or other foreigners. The idea was made up for a television series, broadcast in 2009, called 1066: The Battle for Middle Earth. This is a work of historical fiction which, as its title suggests, tried to cash in on the success of the Lord of the Rings films, often in a rather contrived manner; amongst other things, it had the Anglo-Saxons referring to the Normans as orcs. So, Swaffington is treating a television series as a legitimate source document about Anglo-Saxon history. Not a good sign. The book contains many other serious lapses. It includes a section on Krampus, the devil who – in Austrian folklore – punished naughty children on Christmas; Swaffington claims that Krampus’ habit of abducting children in sacks “almost certainly refers to the terror that the Muslim Moors, also known as Barbary Pirates, brought to Europe”, after which he writes at length about incidents in which Europeans were taken as slaves by Muslims. Nowhere does he provide any actual evidence that this was an influence on the Krampus story; indeed, he emphasises incidents in Britain and Ireland, which are unlikely to have impacted Austrian folklore. Isn’t it more likely that the Krampus story comes from the fear that all children have of being taken from the safety of home and family? Swaffington then goes on to theorise that Krampus was originally a benevolent figure, “a God, a healer of children, or perhaps a spirit of some kind” who beat children so as to cure them of demonic possession – apparently unaware that this theory undermines his earlier insistence that Krampus was based on Muslim pirates. On top of this, he later points out the similarities between Krampus and Beowulf’s foe Grendel, who also carried people away in sacks… yet Beowulf was written about six hundred years before the activities of the Barbary pirates. The impression is that Swaffington brought up the Barbary pirates purely as an excuse to rant about Muslims. This is just one sign of the ideological ugliness underpinning the book. When talking about werewolves, Swaffington mentions that the term “werewolf” was applied to Nazi guerrillas who fought Allied troops in Germany, and uses this as an excuse to offer a weirdly romanticised description of their activities: "In 1945, as the Allies fought their way into Berlin, thousands of young German boys lived on the fringes of towns and cities, in the surrounding forests, and fought the invaders using guerrilla tactics. With the main German army destroyed or detained in concentration camps, the young boys were all that stood between their mothers and sisters and the oncoming soldiers." Er, yes, thank you. At the very end of the book, the author goes on another of his characteristic rants: "Today, we live in an age of decadence and decay, where life is no longer sacred, and healthcare comes at a price; when young ones are murdered in their mother’s womb; a time when men and women are encouraged to hate one another; a time of religious and economic conflict; a time when our leaders worship the economy and serve bankers as their Gods; where mankind pollutes his own seas, tears down his forests, poisons the food we eat, the air we breathe, pours fluoride into our water supply, a time when our media teaches us to fear and to hate. We live in a time when our young men and women are taught that they have no value. I promise you it was better before, when we were Pagans and life was sacred, when every child was thought a blessing from the Gods. There were happier times than this, when the people would come together to worship the Gods, to sing and dance, to cure sickness and disease…" Let’s leave aside the ludicrous implication that we were better at treating diseases before the development of germ theory and modern medicine, and the outright disturbing suggestion that an era of human sacrifice (as Swaffington states elsewhere that Woden/Odin was “associated with rage, fury and war, human sacrifice, hanging and death”) constituted the good old days. What’s remarkable here is how this reactionary sentiment sheds new light on the rest of the book. Swaffington employs a distinctly embattled tone throughout the book, portraying Anglo-Saxon culture as having been constantly chipped away first by Christians, then by Normans, and latterly by political correctness (no wonder he was so eager to claim that the Anglo-Saxons referred to foreigners as "orcs"). He also claims that the subject is somehow being suppressed: “We are taught in England that English history begins in 1066” he says near the start, in yet another of his erroneous assertions; it took me a few seconds’ Googling to confirm that, in reality, the arrival of the Anglo-Saxons is indeed covered by the National Curriculum. So, The Supernatural World of the Anglo-Saxons is a nationalist text. Few things distort history – including the history of folklore – quite as severely as nationalism. In this book, Swaffington draws upon his background as an author of fiction to dream up a bygone England, filled with magical beings from Puck to Odin to Krampus – until the Christians, Muslims and liberals came along to wipe out the old religion, suppress the true history and put fluoride in the water supply. But it’s not too late, the book implies, for the English to turn back the clock and return to a happier time, a simpler time, when we all worshipped a god of human sacrifice and didn’t have to put up with foreign “orcs”. The fact that such a worthless piece of pseudo-scholarship has racked up multiple five-star ratings is shameful. ...more |
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Apr 26, 2026 09:58AM
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Declan Finn is an author I’ve come to think of as the MAGA Garth Marenghi. He specialises in churned-out horror/urban fantasy novels that, in purely formalistic terms, are about what I’d expect from a sub-par Jim Butcher wannabe. What makes Finn stan
Declan Finn is an author I’ve come to think of as the MAGA Garth Marenghi. He specialises in churned-out horror/urban fantasy novels that, in purely formalistic terms, are about what I’d expect from a sub-par Jim Butcher wannabe. What makes Finn stand out is how, despite his online claims to be against authors who lecture readers, he insists on inserting his hard-right political ideology into his stories. The results are, like the work of Jack Chick or Ben Garrison, perversely fascinating. City of Shadows is the fourth book in a series of novels about Thomas “Saint Tommy” Nolan, an NYPD detective who has been granted miracle-working powers by God. The first three books were set in New York, where Nolan went up against the diabolical forces of the Women’s Health Corps (a fictional stand-in for Planned Parenthood) and the nefarious Mayor Hoynes (who, being a Democrat, was only able to gain power by making a pact with Satan.) His demon-busting antics in his home city have sufficiently impressed higher-ups in the Vatican that he’s now receiving job offers overseas: in this book, he’s sent to London to investigate the theft of a supernatural artifact called the Soul Stone from the British Museum. The story hinges on the premise that the Church of England is a secretly atheistic organisation which uses the veneer of religion simply to control the masses. But that control is now weakening as Anglicanism loses ground to the true faith of Roman Catholicism. Among the atheistic puppet-masters are the novel’s two main villains, Lord Newby Fowler and Dame Polly Toynbee (the latter, bizarrely, appears to have been named after a Guardian columnist, and I can only imagine what the real Polly Toynbee would have to say about her inclusion in this unhinged narrative). These godless aristocrats are deeply concerned that even the royals might someday go Catholic (“the Royal family might actually make us give back everything that our ancestors stole from the Catholic church over 500 years ago” says Toynbee) and so have taken desperate measures: they’ve given the Soul Stone to an Islamic hate-preacher, hoping that he and his flock will use its powers to destroy all of London, taking the royals with it. The evil imam, incidentally, is named Abu Hamza Kozbar. Again, Finn appears to be borrowing the names of real people; in this case, Abu Hamza al-Masri and Mohammed Kozbar. The former is a notorious hate-preacher and convicted terrorist; the latter… isn’t. Because the Anglican conspiracy isn’t exposed until the climax, the novel spends much of its time stirring up hatred of Muslims, who are portrayed as so violent that a person can barely walk down a street in London without being attacked. The story’s general standpoint is summarised by this early dialogue from Father Pearson, Nolan’s British liaison: ‘“Knife attacks are up. Violent crime is up. The mayor wants to ban any and all knives in the city, but carry acid? That’s a-okay!” His bright, cheery tone faded and grew cynical. “But carrying around containers of acid? That’s just ducky. Nearly five hundred acid attacks a year, but why not? [...] It doesn’t help that our mayor is a Muslim communist…”’ Now for a reality check. Yes, it’s true that, according to Metropolitan Police statistics, acid attacks in London rose through most of the 2010s, peaking in 2017 when there were 471 such attacks reported. Mayor Sadiq Khan (the “Muslim communist” referred to here) responded that same year by calling for a zero-tolerance approach to the issue and for restrictions on the sale of cleaning products that could be used as offensive weapons. After this, London saw a steady decline in acid attacks, with only 76 being recorded in 2024. Granted, City of Shadows was published in 2019, when the extent of the decline was not yet obvious. Even so, it would have been clear by then that the novel was wildly inaccurate in depicting Sadiq Khan just sitting around doing nothing while the city collapses into scenes that are best described as a Fox News version of that one Simpsons skit with the Cockney hooligans: ‘The male victim was given a hard shove, into a wall next to the girl. Three of the men peeled off to confront me. Two stayed with the girl, and a third stayed with the male. I must not have looked like much. I wore a button down shirt, navy blue blazer, and a light overcoat. It was technically summer, but it was still England. They were a half-dozen young, strong … Middle Eastern men. When Pearson said that there were a lot of these attacks, he wasn’t kidding. “You pricks deaf?” I barked when I was only twenty feet away and closing. “What do you think you’re doing?” The one in the middle said, “Oi. I think you’re in the wrong neighborhood, mate. Shouldn’t you be somewhere posh?” Even though the one in the middle spoke, my eyes were on the one on the right, trying to circle out to the curb. He had a white plastic bottle in his hand, held low and almost entirely behind his thigh. Acid attacks. Nearly five hundred a year.’ Absurdly, this altercation takes place in Bloomsbury, literally around the corner from the British Museum. Why a blue-collar New Yorker would be seen as too “posh” for this location is unclear. The novel’s portrayal of its two evil liberal atheist villains is similarly ludicrous. Just look at this dialogue: ‘“I presume you’re both atheists?” I asked. Fowler laughed. “Of course we are. We are educated, after all.” Toynbee smiled at me and added, “It is so nice to find another educated man. They’re the only ones to talk to. Better than workmen. They seem to all think that news is all propaganda and skips the leading articles. A workman buys a paper for football results and little paragraphs about girls falling out of windows and corpses found in flats.” Fowler shook his head and sighed. “True. They are a problem. We will have to recondition him eventually. But the educated public, the people who read the high-brow weeklies, don’t need reconditioning. They're all right already. They'll believe whatever the papers print, after all.”’ In a recurring tic that goes back to the first book in the series, Finn works on the assumption that anyone who supports the gay community must, by definition, be a paedophile apologist. “Your ‘pro-gay’ support is all about sleeping with children”, says Nolan to Fowler and Toynbee, prompting the evil atheists to begin spouting NAMBLA talking points. We also learn that the two villains have a history of “slipping money to the Rotherham sex slave ring.” That the local authorities in Rotherham covered up the decades-long activities of sex trafficking gangs is a matter of record; the notion that such gangs were being deliberately financed by peers of the realm, however, appears to have sprung from Finn’s fertile imagination. (The fact that he called one of the culprits “Polly Toynbee” might constitute defamation of character.) As for Toynbee and Fowler’s views on immigration, these are summed up as follows: ‘Being pro-refugee and -immigration wasn’t about every refugee and immigrant—only Muslims. If a refugee or immigrant was Buddhist, Kurd, Christian, white or Tibetan, then they were just flat out of luck. They had actively campaigned against allowing non-Muslims out of the Middle East, and those were the groups being annihilated.’ Who, exactly, is being satirised here? Can you point me to anyone, anywhere on the political spectrum, who supports Muslim immigration but is opposed to non-Muslim immigration? And if Toynbee and Fowler support Muslims, then why are they against Kurds? Is Finn simply unaware that the Kurds are a predominantly Muslim people? That wouldn’t surprise me, to be honest. The novel uses the terms “Muslim”, “Arab” and “Middle Easterner” more-or-less interchangeably, despite London’s Muslim population being overwhelmingly Indian, Pakistani and Bangladeshi. This sort of cultural and geographic cluelessness is entirely typical of Finn: the previous book in the series, Infernal Affairs, had an evil Voodoo magician whose accent varied from Haitian to Jamaican between chapters, Finn apparently being unaware that Haiti and Jamaica are different places. The author’s difficulty in writing credible portrayals of people who don’t share his political views extends to the conservative characters. Pearson, the British priest, just happens to agree with Nolan on all ideological points – right down to his belief that the UK should adopt an American-style right to bear arms, despite this being a fringe position in Britain. A buddy-cop team-up between an American conservative and a British conservative, with the ideological distinctions that come with this, might have been halfway interesting; but instead we get two Declan Finn sock-puppets, one saying “butt” while the other says “bum”. And, really, the book’s just not very well-written. The dialogue is peppered with repetitive action beats of the “he frowned” and “I arched a brow” variety (the latter being used ten times). We get tiresome pop-culture references, Finn having yet to realise that, if your story involves baddies stealing a supernatural artifact, the reader will notice the resemblance to Indiana Jones without the narrator pointing it out. We also get some rather petty swipes at other writers. In one scene, Nolan complains that too many urban fantasy novels include “bisexual group sex with were-furries”, as though such material would somehow have made City of Shadows any worse. Elsewhere, he condemns Dan Brown for peddling bigoted propaganda in the guise of writing thrillers. And they say Americans have no grasp of irony. It’s also bad at being urban fantasy, a genre capable of much more. Take Jim Butcher’s Dresden Files, which Finn is so desperately trying to ape. In one of those books, the city is attacked by a necromancer who’s raised an army of the dead. Protagonist Harry Dresden realises that the only way to fight back is by obtaining some undead henchmen of his own; but as a good wizard, he’s forbidden from raising dead people. He solves the issue by exploiting a loophole: while he can’t raise dead *people*, there’s nothing stopping him from popping round the museum and animating some dinosaur skeletons. That’s not even an especially inspired concept. It’s about the bare minimum of invention I’d expect from a story of this sort. Yet it’s streets ahead of anything Finn comes up with. Reading City of Shadows is like reading a description of a video game, the plot points divided up by sloggy action scenes in which Nolan plows through hordes of mooks. Worse, it’s a video game with only three enemy types. One, Muslims with acid; two, Muslims who’ve received laser-vision and other generic superpowers from the Soul Stone (Nolan nicknames these after X-Men characters, just to drive home the unoriginality); three, sentient shadows that never pose much of a threat. And how does Nolan fight off these foes? With the same miraculous powers he’s been using since the series began: bilocation and levitation, both of which have grown seriously stale. The high concept here is that Nolan has been granted abilities attributed to Catholic saints; but is there any theological reason why he can’t be given a few more by this point? Perhaps he could’ve used St. Brigid’s expanding cloak like the giant cellophane “S” in Superman II. A couple of fetching ideas turn up, only to be squandered. At one point, Nolan phones his wife; a demon interferes with the line to make him think she’s breaking up with him. This had potential – imagine if Nolan spent his deadly trip to London convinced that his family was falling apart back home – but the truth gets established so quickly as to render the whole affair pointless. Similarly anticlimactic is the appearance of three angels, who pop up in It’s a Wonderful Life-style modern guises, send the evil imam to hell, and then vanish again. There’s precisely one sequence that shows any real invention, and the result is utterly, hilariously stupid. Nolan confronts the evil aristocrats in Toynbee Tower, and when their jihadi heavies turn up, it looks like all is lost… but then some explosions go off, taking out the baddies. Nolan then reveals to the reader that, earlier on, he took the precaution of placing bombs on the building’s exterior; to avoid harming any innocents on the lower floors, he levitated up the walls and put the explosives on a high story. And where did he get the bombs? Simple: he recruited “every altar boy, deacon, and volunteer at the Westminster Cathedral to assemble aluminum tape, iron oxide and magnesium together in the right formula”. Really, it’s criminal that Finn allowed this chain of events to occur off-page. I can only imagine how the dialogue would’ve run: “Excuse me, Archbishop. I don’t suppose you could help me stage an arson campaign against the residence of Polly Toynbee? Don’t worry, I’m only blowing up one of the high floors.” “Certainly, sir. Wait, hold on, how are you going to get the bombs up there without being seen?” “It's okay, God’s given me the power to levitate up the side of the building.” “Oh, right, that makes sense. I’ll get the altar boys to fetch you some iron oxide.” Astonishingly, even after every member of Westminster Cathedral has become complicit in Nolan’s arson campaign, nobody goes to prison – despite the godless bureaucrats of the London Met having it in for Nolan. I realise that Finn has a low opinion of police competence in Britain, but really? If you’d like a second opinion on the merit of Finn’s writing, here’s a rather telling comment from Russell Newquist, who published City of Shadows: ‘My wife and I had to explain to him [Declan Finn] why certain scenes in the earlier drafts of his books didn’t work… and he just wasn’t getting it. He really and truly doesn’t understand this stuff.’ Having suffered through the published version of City of Shadows, I can only shudder to contemplate those earlier drafts. ...more |
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