Something More than Night
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- $11.99
Publisher Description
Anno Dracula author Kim Newman reimagines the lives of Raymond Chandler and Boris Karloff with his signature wit in this gripping and horrifying tale of late 1930s Hollywood
Hollywood, the late 1930s.
Raymond Chandler writes detective stories for pulp magazines, and drinks more than he should. Boris Karloff plays monsters in the movies, and is a genial, cricket-playing member of the British filmland colony on the shores of the Pacific.
Both understand that these streets are dark with something more than night. Together, these English public school men in exile investigate mysterious matters in a town run by human and inhuman monsters.
Under Home House, the mock gothic mock mansion of a film mogul, is a mad science dungeon just like in the movies – where an experiment has gone dangerously wrong, or even more dangerously right. Fiery death spills onto Sunset Boulevard.
Joh Devlin, an investigator for the District Attorney's office who scores high on insubordination, and Laurel Ives, a woman with as many lives as a cat and names to match, barely escape Home House.
Fired by the DA, Devlin enlists Ray and Billy – Raymond Chandler and William Pratt (Boris Karloff) – to work the case, which threatens to expose Hollywood's most horrific secrets.
These people will find out more than they should about the way this town works. And about each other.
And, oh yes, monsters aren't just for the movies
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
Newman (Anno Dracula) crafts a genre-bending mystery that twines meticulously researched history with the unabashedly campy tropes of early sci-fi and horror. In the 1930s, Hollywood mogul Ward Home Jr. bursts from his Gothic home on Sunset Boulevard on fire and strapped into a strange metal contraption. He's pursued by a special effects engineer who douses him before fleeing the scene. When investigator Joh Devlin takes the unusual arson case, he discovers a mad scientist's laboratory and multiple corpses underneath the Home house, but he's kicked off the case when he refuses to sell a neat explanation of events. He enlists writer Raymond Chandler and actor Boris Karloff to help him unofficially continue his investigation, plunging all three into a madcap plot that takes them across the borders of life and death. Though the narrative can feel disjointed, jumping between narrators and timelines, Newman successfully integrates real historical figures into a tale that's equal parts monster movie and detective noir, abounding with witches, murderous clowns, Frankenstein's monsterlike creatures, and brooding gumshoes. The result is both an homage and a glorious reinvention, perfect for those nostalgic for the pulpy genre fiction of the past.
