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The Arcanum [Hardcover]

Thomas Wheeler (Author)
3.0 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (23 customer reviews)


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Book Description

April 27, 2004
It is 1919 and the Great War has come to a close. But in the shadows of the world’s major cities, the killing has just begun. In this perilous time, as the division between order and chaos grows increasingly slim, a select group of visionaries have taken it upon themselves to ensure the safety of humanity. They are known as the Arcanum.

In London’s stormy Hyde Park, Konstantin Duvall, the Arcanum’s founder, has been killed in a suspicious accident. Dismayed, the group’s longest-lived member, Sir Arthur Conan Doyle, determines to avenge Duvall’s death—and uncover the secret left in his wake. For the dead man possessed the world’s most powerful—now missing—artifact: the Book of Enoch, the chronicle of God’s mistakes, within whose pages lie the seeds for the end of everything.

From the scene of the crime, Conan Doyle embarks on a path that leads him to the sleazy underworld of New York City’s Bowery and a series of deceptively disparate—but decidedly connected—murders. And as he calls upon the scattered members of the Arcanum for aid, he also finds himself embroiled in a story of war as old as time itself. Not of a struggle between countries, but between darkness and light.
Peopled with the twentieth century’s most famous—and infamous—figures, here is an extraordinary tale in which the stakes go beyond the realm of humankind—into the divine.

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Editorial Reviews

From Publishers Weekly

In screenwriter Wheeler's cinematic debut novel, an occult thriller set in New York City in 1919, Sir Arthur Conan Doyle and his fellow members of a secret society known as the Arcanumâ€"including magician Harry Houdini and voodoo priestess Marie Laveauâ€"investigate a gruesome murder, rescue horror writer H.P. Lovecraft from jail, consult evil mystic Aleister Crowley, learn the truth behind the ancient Book of Enoch, try to solve the mystery of a tribe of lost angels and otherwise save the world. All the supernatural shenanigans, however, can't disguise that these characters, with their contemporary sensibilities, are crude caricatures of their real-life originals. Lovecraft, for example, is reduced to a perverse boyish demonologist, while Laveau is a sexpot who speaks in a Caribbean patois: "So, how we s'posed to get him outta that jail?" Each vividly written chapter is so obviously a film scene that credit should be given for art direction. The author uses nearly every landmark available in 1919 New York for a setting, but a wealth of well-researched period detail is no substitute for a true feeling for an era's zeitgeist. Those seeking thought-provoking "secret history" would do better to turn to the fiction of Tim Powers (Last Call) or Alexander C. Irvine (A Scattering of Jades).
Copyright © Reed Business Information, a division of Reed Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.

Review

"Cinematic…. Vividly written."
--Publishers Weekly

"THE ARCANUM is a first-class thriller; superbly crafted, it moves like lightning, creating a world where historical fact and wild invention are interwoven. Marvellous stuff!"
--Clive Barker, author of Coldheart Canyon and The Abarat

“From some dark bridge between history and fiction, Thomas Wheeler’s THE ARCANUM throws the reader into a midnight’s maelstrom of mystery, thrills, and pure adrenaline fun. Hold your breath and enjoy the ride!”
--Wes Craven, director of the Scream and Nightmare on Elm St. series

Product Details

  • Hardcover: 336 pages
  • Publisher: Bantam; 1ST edition (April 27, 2004)
  • Language: English
  • ISBN-10: 055380314X
  • ISBN-13: 978-0553803143
  • Product Dimensions: 9.1 x 6.4 x 1 inches
  • Shipping Weight: 1.3 pounds
  • Average Customer Review: 3.0 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (23 customer reviews)
  • Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #2,106,141 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

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Customer Reviews

23 Reviews
5 star:
 (5)
4 star:
 (6)
3 star:
 (2)
2 star:
 (5)
1 star:
 (5)
 
 
 
 
 
Average Customer Review
3.0 out of 5 stars (23 customer reviews)
 
 
 
 
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Most Helpful Customer Reviews

22 of 23 people found the following review helpful:
2.0 out of 5 stars The Arcanum, November 4, 2004
By 
This review is from: The Arcanum (Hardcover)
Thomas Wheeler's The Arcanum is an ambitious novel by a competent novelist. Regrettably, a story this ambitious requires more than mere competence. It requires vision, talent, skill and imagination, features that are in short supply here.

The first indication that this was going to be a substandard read was right on the cover - the back of the dustjacket was lined with praise from primarily mediocre writers like Christopher Golden and Robert Doherty. The second clue is the cast of characters, a group of historical figures so overused as to have become a crutch for authors of little imagination. How many times have Doyle and Houdini been paired as erstwhile detectives? How many times has Doyle been cast as a hero of Holmesian intellect? How many times has Lovecraft come face to face with the Old Ones of his Cthulu mythos, having thought they were merely figments of his imagination? The only fresh character here is Marie Laveau, but even she had to be shoehorned into place from across space and time, seeing as she never left New Orleans and died years before 1919, when this book takes place.

Wheeler comes up with half a dozen clever ideas that he tosses casually into a paragraph, magical explanations for such events as the assassination of Archduke Ferdinand and the murder of the Romanoff family, but the cleverness of these tossed-off concepts pales beneath the ineptitude of the rest of the novel. It appears Wheeler did very little research into the time period about which he wrote, or the characters with which he elected to populate The Arcanum. Lovecraft is portrayed as a sniveling madman and Marie Laveau is characterized only with dropped g's at the end of gerunds and a few "cheres" thrown in to remind us all that she is from the south. Never mind that she was an intelligent Creole woman, not a Cajun.

The story itself is a ridiculous mash. The chief badman is intent on destroying the world, a pretty ridiculous proposition for anyone. Think about it - where would he live, and with whom? There are angels, demons, lost tribes and ancient artifacts. Aleister Crowley appears as a menacing mage, instead of the fusty old milquetoast fraud he truly was. Other historical figures wander wanly through the narrative without convincing us of their veracity.

This is a moderately entertaining book for those who prefer their historical fantasy fiction without all that messy "history", but if you are a stickler for research, plot and characterization, move on to anything by the sublime Tim Powers and pass on The Arcanum.
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12 of 14 people found the following review helpful:
2.0 out of 5 stars better concept than execution, June 26, 2004
By 
Terrell T. Gibbs (Jamaica Plain, MA United States) - See all my reviews
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This review is from: The Arcanum (Hardcover)
It's a nice concept. Arthur Conan Doyle, Harry Houdini, HP Lovecraft, and Marie Leveau are part of a secret society of demon-busters dedicated to fighting incursions of the Lovecraftian mythos into our world. There are cameo appearances by famous mystics A.E Waite and Aleister Crowley. The problem is that first-time novelist Wheeler isn't really up to the task of fleshing out all of these colorful characters. Conan Doyle sort of works as a real-world incarnation of his literary creation and Houdini is not bad, but HP Lovecraft rings false as some kind of steampunk technomystic, and voodoo queen Leveau comes across surprisingly bland. There are also some serious anachronisms. At one point, Lovecraft is described as using a "transistorized" device. Transistors? In 1919?
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5 of 6 people found the following review helpful:
3.0 out of 5 stars A bit of fluff, April 7, 2005
By 
Rhiannon "Rhiannon" (the fun side of the potomac!) - See all my reviews
This review is from: The Arcanum (Hardcover)
I got this book from the library expecting an easy and fun read, and that's what I got. I think it's a mistake to expect anything else from it.

It wasn't the best written book in the world, but certainly not the worst and it was just a bit of fluff for me to read between more serious books.

I don't recommend buying this book, but if you see it at the library and you're interested in the period or concept, give it a read.
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Inside This Book (learn more)
First Sentence:
A SEPTEMBER STORM battered a sleeping London. Read the first page
Key Phrases - Statistically Improbable Phrases (SIPs): (learn more)
gem eyes, deerstalker cap, obsidian mirror, voodoo queen, ruby eyes, stairwell door
Key Phrases - Capitalized Phrases (CAPs): (learn more)
Madame Rose, Book of Enoch, Sir Arthur, Detective Mullin, Empire State Express, Konstantin Duvall, Paul Caleb, Silver Ghost, New York City, Crow's Head, Aleister Crowley, Marie Laveau, Sherlock Holmes, Daniel Bisbee, Fourth Ward, Bess Houdini, Willow Grove Cemetery, Captain Bartleby, City Hall, Hall of Relics, Harry Houdini, John Dee, Margaret Murray, New Orleans, Sebastian Aloysius
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