The Monster's Lament: A Novel

by Robert Edric

An extraordinary imagining of the dark arts in war-torn London from one of the most brilliant literary talents around.
     April 1945. While the Allied Forces administer the killing blow to Nazi Germany, at home London's teeming underworld of black marketeers, pimps, prostitutes, conmen and thieves prepare for the coming peace. But the man the newspapers call the English Monster, the self-procaimed Antichrist, Aleister Crowley, is making preparations for the future for his immortality.

     For Crowley's plan to work, he has to depend upon one of London's Most Wanted, ambitious gangland boss Tommy Fowler, who, presiding over a crumbling empire, can still get you anything you want -- for a price.

     And what Crowley wants is a young man, Peter Tait, in Pentonville Prison under sentence of death for murder. Convinced of his innocence but unable to prove it, his only chance of survival lies in the hands of one detective struggling against the odds to win a desperate appeal that has little chance of success.

      The Monster's Lament is an extraordinary journey through a ruined landscape towards an ending more terrible and all-consuming than any of its participants can have imagined. When you're used to fighting monsters abroad, it is easy to overlook the monsters closer to home.

Genres: Fiction, Historical Fiction, Crime

368 pages, Paperback

First published March 28, 2013

About the author

Robert Edric (b. 1956) is the pseudonym of Gary Edric Armitage, a British novelist born in Sheffield.

Reviews

[Larry Rodness · Rating 4 out of 5]

The novel centers around petty thieves and a particularly shady historical character. The Second World War is coming to a close and everyone is wheeling and dealing in an effort to make the transition economically and emotionally sound. At first look the characters and plots appear not to tell a cohesive story but as you are drawn in, the author does a good job on intersecting these disparate elements. The characters are well drawn and I was compelled to turn the pages which is one of the main criteria I use to judge a book.

[Iain · Rating 2 out of 5]

Unimpressed, to be honest. I like other books by Edric - The Sword Cabinet and The Book Of The Heathen. The story seemed fascinating, following Jake Arnott's outstanding novel, The Devil's Paintbrush, also featuring the notorious Crowley. But this book is populated by too many cardboard cutouts. Crowley talks a lot, as one might imagine, but there is no sense of menace, little depth, and not much happens. More plot, fewer POVs and less dialogue would have sharpened this story.

[Louise · Rating 3 out of 5]

Interesting book...our for me...when you take a time you've read so much about (ending of the war), throw in a character you are vaguely familiar with (Aleister Crowley) and a whole heap of other characters and situations too.
To begin with I thought this was just going to be a gangster book about easy end London in the war time, but then enters the magician and the death row prisoner and it becomes a bit more than that.
Entertained me for a few hours, so gets thumbs up.

[George Ilsley · Rating 3 out of 5]

It's 1945, near the end of World War II in Europe, and this novel is set in the licentious criminal underbelly of London. Aleister Crowley is a character, and a sub-plot, and this element did not resonate with me — the voice felt off, and his character two dimensional. Otherwise the novel is well populated, and the setting convincing.

[David Grieve · Rating 5 out of 5]

A fascinating and intriguing vision of the London underworld at the very end of the Second World War. The world of thieves, pimps, black marketeers and prostitutes has flourished through the war but with the end in sight there is a change in the air and the clever money knows that the staus quo cannot remain. Aleister Crowley, the fabled Beast, spots one last opportunity to get what he has always craved. Ageing and decrepit as he is, he visits Tommy Fowler, a gangland boss, to get one simple job done, to help him achieve his aim.

Flitting between the worlds of Crowley, Fowler and his henchmen and girls and a condemned man in prison the story is underpinned by a constant sense of menace with the potential for violence at all times. The story is beautifully crafted and the characters are all well rounded and believable. As ever with Robert Edric, the dialogue is clever and often just slightly stilted; enough to maintain the tension and edge. Literary fiction of the absolute highest order and very, very readable.

[Laura · Rating 3 out of 5]

Aleister Crowley takes centre-stage in the book's marketing, but as this novel develops, it's clear that he is just one of its plot strands, woven in with a cast of crooks, tarts, an honest copper and the occasional V-1 droning overhead. The overall effect is at once quite compelling and strangely unsatisfactory. In a lot of ways, it was reminiscent of Gissing or Patrick Hamilton (one character shares the name of the protagonist of 'Hangover Square'), but Edric lacks Gissing's human sympathy and descriptive flair and Hamilton's political vision and bleak humour. All too often, promising situations founder in a snowdrift of moody dialogue in which we either get to play 'guess the unspoken assumption' or have to read what amounts to lengthy stage directions (this is very much the case in the other Edric novel I've read, 'The London Satyr'). Dialogue, as Gissing discovered, quickly fills pages when you have a tight deadline to meet, but Edric isn't in quite the same penurious position as his Victorian forebear. He uses dialogue as a kind of short cut to advancing the plot and to revealing the psychology of the characters, a trick which spares him having to do much scene-setting (for all that the period slang feels accurate here, there's little real sense of period...Patrick McGrath's 'The Wardrobe Mistress' conveyed that much better). When the trick works, it makes for quite tense scenes of character interplay, though there's always a suspicion that Edric is angling to write the screenplay for the film version which will never be made. When it doesn't work, his characters freeze into cardboard and cliche, and the novel stalls.
As for Crowley's role in proceedings, he's a shadow of his former self (see Jake Arnott's 'The Devil's Paintbrush'), sitting in a chair in stained old pants, musing on former glories and flaccid on his legend, as Bowie doesn't quite say. He's cooked up some sort of soul transference nonsense, but his failing heart isn't really in it. Like a lot of old blokes, he just wants a young woman to listen to him. Still, he's preferable to the gangsters on offer, who are all rather 'Brighton Rock' but without the Catholicism or literary flair. There isn't a line in this book's 445 pages to match Greene's description of Pinkie Brown having eyes like wet pebbles.
I read this for the Crowley angle, so was disappointed to see the Great Beast play only a supporting role. It isn't a bad novel by any means, but it is bulky and slow with a few too many minor characters who don't contribute enough to the whole. It also needs an editor to cut back the overgrown dialogue and shape it into something more suited to the needs of the story.

[Roland Marchal · Rating 4 out of 5]

I have enjoyed most of Edric's work and this is no exception. The story takes place in London as WW2 is ending and Underworld gangs a reorganising themselves for peacetime. There is also an aging mystic who somehow thinks that the death by hanging of an innocent man will help achieve some sort of immortality. As with most of Edrics work there is no real plot or satisfactory ending but the quality of the writing keep you engrossed with the characters. The ending is somewhat over long but I was happy to mark it with 4 stars because of the vividness of the characters within their scenes.

[Louise Bath · Rating 4 out of 5]

⭐️⭐️⭐️⭐️½

[Christopher Dennis · Rating 4 out of 5]

I can understand why some would not like this book as it follows several seemingly separate stories that are intertwined but the eventual outcome is neither conclusive or possibly even that palatable.
It took a couple of chapters to get used to the writing style but once I did I enjoyed reading the story and felt that it certainly emulates life in that a book can really only be a snapshot of life or indeed many lives and the story oftens starts before and ends after the snapshot is taken.
Not recommended for those who like neat endings.
Would I read another book by the author - yes

[Laff · Rating 2 out of 5]

Having read several of Edric's books and really enjoyed the quality and the variety of subject matter I was disappointed with this novel. Set at the end of WW2 it creates a reasonable impression of London at that time but the characters are two-dimensional and are inconsistently drawn, alternately all-knowing and ignorant, while the inclusion of the real Aleister Crowley is rather a red herring.

[Belle Wood · Rating 4 out of 5]

I don't usually read noir or crime, but hey, throw in Aleister Crowley and you have me by the balls. WWII is just about to end and Crowley is searching for immortality; it depends on the death of a boy condemned for murder on spurious evidence. As with most noir, there isn't a happy ending, not for anyone in the story.

[Karen · Rating 1 out of 5]

What a bore! The gangster stuff was just one big cliché and the stuff with Aleister Crowley a complete damp squib. Wont be reading anything else by this author.

[Marc Schofield · Rating 2 out of 5]

overlong and with cliched characters and Crowley was heavy boring.

[Julian Gilder · Rating 5 out of 5]

Great book. Fantastically done with a great ending. I love reading this author.