Dreams of Shreds and Tatters

March 30, 2015
Downum (the Necromancer Chronicles) grounds this tale of friendship and love in a community of artists and magic users. When a ritual goes terribly wrong and leaves Vancouver artist Blake Enderly in a coma, his best friend, Liz Drake, and her stereotypically English boyfriend, Alex, travel to Vancouver to find out what happened to him. To save his life, Liz must navigate deadly magical peril in the waking world and undertake a quest in an equally dangerous dream world that leads her to Robert Chambers’s Carcosa and its ruler, the Yellow King. Downum’s narrative is packed to excess with artists and hangers-on, a dangerous drug with connections to the dream world, bloodthirsty maenads, and gun-toting cleanup artists specializing in supernatural mishaps. Readers eager for diverse characters will delight in the casually displayed variety of sexual and romantic orientations, including Liz’s comfortable asexuality. The vividly evoked bohemian, magical Vancouver and the haunting dream lands are largely secondary to the bonds of love, romantic and otherwise, among the novel’s likable, intensely beleaguered core characters. Agent: Jennifer Jackson, Donald Maass Literary Agency.

March 15, 2015

When she doesn't hear from her friend Blake for months, Liz Drake travels with her roommate Alex to Vancouver where Blake had been living with a circle of artists that included his boyfriend Alain. She finds that Blake is in a coma, Alain is dead, and the artists, especially gallery owner Ranier, are keeping secrets. And Liz has been dreaming of Blake, trapped under water, visions that also reveal a secret world and a yellow king. VERDICT This unusual blend of urban fantasy and trippy horror is particularly notable for its lovely descriptions by Downum, author of "The Necromancer Chronicles" (last seen in 2012's Kingdoms of Dust). She keeps the horrors slipping in and out of shadows--more menacing for being only half seen. Allusions to H.P. Lovecraft, Robert W. Chambers, and Ambrose Bierce are combined with modern city streets, addictive psychotropic drugs, and a stubborn heroine determined to save a friend.

Copyright 2015 Library Journal, LLC Used with permission.

March 1, 2015
In a novel that brings together modern Vancouver and a nightmarish dream world, Downum (The Kingdoms of Dust, 2012, etc.) offers an unsettling adventure that relies on some familiar elements of urban fantasy. Liz Drake, a 25-year-old graduate student, has what she believes are prophetic dreams. When her friend Blake Enderly has a strange accident and falls into a coma, Liz finds herself dreaming about Blake drowning, over and over again, in a dark and progressively more fantastical place. Spurred on by her dreams and guilt over past dreams that seemed to foretell the deaths of friends and family, Liz goes to Vancouver to rescue Blake and is embroiled in an unlikely world of artists who are also magicians, monsters, and angels. The squabbling and hunger for power that drives these factions against each other also connects them to the mysterious city of Carcosa, a place that can only be reached by magic or, for those with a talent for it, by dreams. As Liz attempts to bring Blake back to the waking world, her efforts combine with the others' ongoing struggles to let dangerous bits of the dream world leak into reality. While the various elements of the world inside the novel are appealing, they often cross the line into predictable urban fantasy cliche and offer very little freshness or surprise to charm the reader. The intersecting storylines sometimes seem to lose track of each other, and any suspense or momentum that might turn the novel's expected elements into enjoyable entertainment are obscured by a slack plot and overwrought description. A contemporary fantasy with a potentially fascinating setup that gets overwhelmed by prosaic writing and an unambitious use of familiar tropes.