AMBER BENSON
 
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Ghosts of Albion/Astray Amber Benson, Christopher Golden
This little book grew out of the animated "Ghosts of Albion"-Project for the BBC that AB started with fantasist Christopher Golden. You can learn more about all that via www.bbc.co.uk, but it’s not required to know any installments of the series to appreciate and enjoy "Astray". This book is essentially a self-contained early modern fairy tale set in Victorian England. It features two siblings, William and Tamara Swift, that are heirs to an eminent victorian family and mystical protectors of the realm. In "Astray", they have to solve a case of multiple child abduction by unseen powers that took place in one of the rustic backwater regions of the enchanted isle. It’s got a lot going for it on a mere 90 pages: the texture of a richly fragrant background (some of it agreeably musty, Giles wd. feel right at home), some of the charms of the early police-procedural and crime-deciphering literature (as in Arthur Conan Doyle’s work or even Charles Dickens’ uncompleted "Mystery of Edwin Drood"), well-handled cameo appearances by the Ghosts of Admiral Nelson and Lord Byron, the odd anachronistic flash of caustic sitcom-dialogue ("I hate it when he does that" is what you say of ghosts and their disappearing antics when you’ve been around those too long), some magical marriage-counseling, changeling kids (what we call "Wechselbälger" over here in the Brothers Grimm’s Germany), authentic faeriefolk, the Wild Hunt, deep dark woods and a naked barbarian Queen who could give Lucy Lawless a run for her money.

You’ ll get through it in no time and will retain the taste of an entirely plausible universe, and if you can spare the time and the little effort of the intellect, the story may reward your trying to guess which parts of the seamlessly fast-paced whole were crafted by Amber Benson and which ones were invented by Christopher Golden. I for one thought that the emphasis on the heroes’ family background, the strength they gain from it and the way that their history and their ancestors’ history gave off a strong sense of AB’s perspective on things, whereas some of the impressively effective descriptive passages (I just wanted to call them "set-pieces") reminded me of some of Golden’s work I’ve seen. Besides being a worthwhile read and an obvious collector’s item for fans of AB’s (it’s the first book with her byline and we can reasonably expect it to not be the last), this is a really nice edition, not just because it’s signed by both authors and features about half a dozen very stylish illustrations by the book’s designer José R. Nieto, but also because the binding and overall design is another fine job by small publisher Subterranean Press (www.subterraneanpress.com, I’ve seen a number of their books by now and own their fine edition of the inimitable Lucius Shepard’s "Aztechs" – they’ve demonstrated a fine taste both for authors and production values that the larger outfits which generally don’t service us genre readers very well are all too obviously missing these days).
Jolly good, as they supposedly say you-know-where.
Dietmar Dath

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