Something More Than Night
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3.0 • 3 Ratings
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- $9.99
Publisher Description
With his signature wit, the award-winning author of Anno Dracula, Kim Newman, reimagines the lives of Raymond Chandler and Boris Karloff in this daring and horrifying tale.
'If more mysteries were written like this, I’d read more mysteries.' - Grady Hendrix, author of The Final Girl Support Group
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. Together, they investigate mysterious matters in a town run by human and inhuman monsters.
Joh Devlin, an investigator for the DA’s office who scores high on insubordination, enlists the pair to work a case that threatens to expose Hollywood’s most horrific secrets. Together they 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.
