Reading Pat Kelleher's "No Man's World: The Alleyman" and Defending the Portal Novel

Pat Kelleher returns this month with the third volume of his No Man's World series: The Alleyman (Abaddon 2012). For those unfamiliar with the series:I refer you to my reviews of The Black Hand Gang (Abaddon 2010), for Red Rook Review here, and The Ironclad Prophecy (Abaddon 2011), for Hub Magazine here. As you can plainly see, I love Kelleher's heady melange of alternate military history, Edwardian portal novel, death world adventure, dark fantasy, horror, and science fiction. His intentional genre mishmash makes his novels irresistible. 

The Alleyman (Abaddon 2012) picks up from where The Ironclad Prophecy ended. Four months have passed since Jeffries, the magus, concocted some spell to transfer a large portion of the Somme battlefield to an unknown world, along with an entire battalion of British infantry, the Pennine Fusiliers, a British tank and its crew, a pilot and his plane, and a hand full of nurses. As you can readily see the cast of the series is large and at the beginning of The Alleyman, they are spread over the map of the death world. A large cast and a gigantic created-world present their own peculiar problems to an extended narrative. I faithfully follow a few series: Jim Butcher's The Dresden Files,  Simon Scarrow's Cato and Macro, the Black Library's Gotrek and Felix, George R.R. Martin's  A Song of Ice and Fire, Harry Sidebottom's Warrior of Rome, and now Abaddon's No Man World. And I have noticed that each one shares a common problem: as the narrative extends in length and complexity, the author must find a way to bring the reader along and remind him or her of all that has come before. They usually accomplish this through dialogue as they situate their characters on the stage. Some simply present a data dump, while others spread the summary through the novel . No matter, the solution always results in a slower beginning and so it is in The Alleyman. But be patient; writing a series is a marathon. The reader must sit back, take a deep breath, and enjoy the ride. 

The initial scenes of the novel find the fusiliers recovering from a series of disasters: a vicious attack by the local chatts, sentient insectoid creatures that dominate the world, the loss of the tank, Ivanhoe, in a gigantic crater, the escape of Jeffries, and the discovery of a bizarre metallic wall.  The men are tired, disillusioned, wounded, and angry. So to complicate matters, they mutiny. Lieutenant Everson deals with the mutiny and then turns to his other tasks: the recovery of the tank, the return of a chatt priest to its people in a bid for peace, and the capture of Jeffries. These three problems form the the major prongs of the plot.

And the novel is highly plot driven with a Saturday morning serial vibe. It's pulp trappings (a la Edgar Rice Burroughs or Robert E. Howard) should not dissuade the reader though. Kelleher is a strong writer with a thorough knowledge of World War I; he has  created a multi-level, nuanced death world populated by a plethora of unique creatures, well-rounded Edwardian soldiers, and two indigenous species with their own religions and civilizations. Additionally, as an Abaddon series, Kelleher has also created so many mysteries that it will take a bakers' dozen novels to fully explore them. I will give you just one example of one of his cast-off mysteries: in the first volume, the magus, Jeffries, finds in the chatt city a Roman coin, a denarius, that immediately alerts the reader that throughout time other peoples, besides the Roanoke colonists and the Pennine Fusiliers, have been drawn to the world. Maybe even the chatts are aliens to the world?  And then there is the world itself? With the discovery of the metallic wall and the existence of an underworld, I wonder about its substance and origin.

Ultimately , The Alleyman introduces new characters and monsters, propels the plot forward, uncovers new mysteries, employs horror motifs (zombie-like creatures appear), and ushers us to the brink of a new chapter in the series.

As an aside, there has been a lot written lately about the death of the portal novel; most recently Rachel Manija in her Portal Fantasy: Threat or Menace  discusses agents' and publishers' distaste for the portal fantasy:  They explained that portal fantasies tend to have no stakes because they're not connected enough to our world. While in theory, a portal fantasy could have the fate of both our world and the other world at stake, in practice, the story is usually just about the fantasy world. The fate of the real world is not affected by the events of the story, and there is no reason for readers to care what happens to a fantasy world. 

Let's get something straight: the portal novel has been a staple in fantasy and science fiction since the beginning. C. S. Lewis, Edgar Rice Burroughs, Robert Heinlein, Stephen R. Donaldson, among others, have employed the portal novel to transport us from the here and now to the other. There is even an argument that both J.R.R. Tolkien's The Hobbit and The Lord of the Rings are portal novels.Think about it: Hobbits living safely in the Shire through the machinations of wizards are propelled into a larger more dangerous world. See Farah Mendlesohn's Rhetorics of Fantasy (Wesleyan 2008).  

Portal novels are a rhetorical convention that take the reader from the real to the fantastic. If the characters are well-rounded and the story of their plight compelling we care about them. As to the agent's statement that the story is about the fantasy world, my response is so what. More importantly, MMORPGs have shown us that people like to be transported to other worlds. They enjoy exploring and facing new creatures. In fact, No Man's World demonstrates a definite game-like quality: one of the pleasures of reading Kelleher is encountering new creatures,  plants, or viruses. The book's biological richness and diversity of the death world plus the attractive characters make the series a delight.

Finally, No Man's World fulfills what I suspect is Abaddon's brief: create an exciting, well-written fiction that blends various fantasy memes, motifs, and metaphors into a highly readable narrative.

Pocket Universe, Fissure, Hernia, or Portal Novel: A Reading of Adam Christopher's "Empire State"

When I first heard about Adam Christopher's debut novel, Empire State (Angry Robot Books 2012), I immediately began to imagine a world similar to the Coen Brothers' Miller's Crossing, intermixed with a panoply of superheroes à la Alan Moore.

As my imagination took off, I heard Scott Joplin tunes playing in speakeasys in Harlem and wild nights spent at the Cotton Club, listening to Cab Calloway, dancing to Minnie the Moocher. Around the city, Murder Incorporated butchered its enemies and bloated bodies floated on the East River, while out-of-work veterans lived in a make-shift Hooverville in Central Park, forgotten men panhandled on Fifth Avenue, and a William Powell and Myrna Loy film runs at a theater on Sixth Avenue. Communist cells spring up in Brooklyn and the Bronx, enlisting Jewish immigrants, disenfranchised blacks and poor whites. Irish cops, maybe one of my relatives, walk their beats in Manhattan and the FBI dukes it out with gangsters bringing in whiskey from Canada. Raymond Chandler writes The Big Sleep and the first-person noir voice is born.

Unfortunately, my imagination got ahead of me. Adam Christopher's novel contains some of the same elements delivered by my fevered imagination but his novel is something different, more original than just a science fiction novel set within a historical period. His novel owes more to the strange, almost bizarre comics that emerged in the thirties and forties. Anyone who grew up in the forties and fifties is familiar with the strange comic world of Chester Gould's Dick Tracy. Tracy appeared in 1931 and received its impetus and story lines from gangland violence in Chicago. Gould imbued his comic with violence, strange science and villains so evil that they expressed their personalities through their tortured and deformed flesh. Christopher's novel does not allude to Gould but it certainly hums with comic vibrations from the work of Bob Kane. Kane, the creator of Batman, entered the field in 1936. His characters, like those of Gould, are dark, haunted creatures who live in a Gothic universe. Christopher is a young man, who admits that he came to comics late. His sensibilities rely more on Doctor Who, Alan Moore, the Disney film The Rocketeer and Grant Morrison. Consequently, his vision formed in the cauldron of modern pop culture envisions something unique and slightly grotesque; a pocket world, hernia-like, is formed when two superheroes-- disputing lovers--wage a combat to the death over the skies of Manhattan in 1930. From their duel a fissure is formed and a new world created. But it isn't just one world that springs fully formed from New York; it is a mirror image similar to a series of soap bubbles, forming world after world. The first world on the string is Empire State, a pocket world born in 1930.

Within the first fissure, doubles live, unaware of their counterparts above them. It is a strange gaseous place, similar to the world of the film Dark City, where people from both sides of the fissure wander, fall, disappear, and work. The protagonist, Rad Bradley, is a down and out gumshoe, existing without any visible means of support, waiting for that one femme fatale to walk into his seedy office. And , of course, she enters, as sexy as Veronica Lake and as rich as Croesus. Katherine Kopek is looking for her lover, who has disappeared without a trace and she hires Rad to find her. His search will connect him to intrigue emanating from the fissure and the machinations of the cognoscenti within the fissure. So begins his quest and the adventure.

Within the structure of the noir, Christopher creates a comic-book sensibility with enough ideas in this book to fuel a long run of subsequent tales, after all there are a million stories in the Naked City or Empire State.

Empire State, however, is not a re-creation of New York in the 30s; it is a comic book facsimile with modern tonalities and an understanding of various genres--noir, science fiction, portal novel, time travel (of sorts). It is a unique work, although it has borrowed memes from a panoply of authors and genres and it is some-what raw at times, carving its own niche in a field  and a publisher known for its unique works.

Finally, Empire State is a veritable petri dish of ideas and images.