Darker Angels [Import] [Paperback]

S. P. Somtow (Author)

Product Details

• Paperback: 352 pages
• Publisher: London Gollancz 1997. (1997)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0575061227
• ISBN-13: 978-0575061224
• Product Dimensions: 8.5 x 5.7 x 1.3 inches
• Shipping Weight: 1.3 pounds
• Average Customer Review: 4.4 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (10 customer reviews)

More About the Author

Once referred to by the International Herald Tribune as 'the most well-known expatriate Thai in the world,' Somtow Sucharitkul is no longer an expatriate, since he has returned to Thailand after five decades of wandering the world. He is best known as an award-winning novelist and a composer of operas.
Born in Bangkok, Somtow grew up in Europe and was educated at Eton and Cambridge. His first career was in music and in the 1970s, his first return to Asia, he acquired a reputation as a revolutionary composer, the first to combine Thai and Western instruments in radical new sonorities. Conditions in the arts in the region at the time proved so traumatic for the young composer that he suffered a major burnout, emigrated to the United States, and reinvented himself as a novelist.
His earliest novels were in the science fiction field and he soon won the John W. Campbell for Best New Writer as well as being nominated for and winning numerous other awards in the field. But science fiction was not able to contain him and he began to cross into other genres. In his 1984 novel Vampire Junction, he injected a new literary inventiveness into the horror genre, in the words of Robert Bloch, author of Psycho, 'skillfully combining the styles of Stephen King, William Burroughs, and the author of the Revelation to John.' Vampire Junction was voted one of the forty all-time greatest horror books by the Horror Writers' Association, joining established classics like Frankenstein and Dracula. He has also published children's books, a historical novel, and about a hundred works of short fiction.
In the 1990s Somtow became increasingly identified as a uniquely Asian writer with novels such as the semi-autobiographical Jasmine Nights and a series of stories noted for a peculiarly Asian brand of magic realism, such as Dragon's Fin Soup, which is currently being made into a film directed by Takashi Miike. He recently won the World Fantasy Award, the highest accolade given in the world of fantastic literature, for his novella The Bird Catcher. His forty-seven books have sold about two million copies world-wide.
After becoming a Buddhist monk for a period in 2001, Somtow decided to refocus his attention on the country of his birth, founding Bangkok's first international opera company and returning to music, where he again reinvented himself, this time as a neo-Asian neo-Romantic composer. The Norwegian government commissioned his song cycle Songs Before Dawn for the 100th Anniversary of the Nobel Peace Prize, and he composed at the request of the government of Thailand his Requiem: In Memoriam 9/11 which was dedicated to the victims of the 9/11 tragedy.
According to London's Opera magazine, 'in just five years, Somtow has made Bangkok into the operatic hub of Southeast Asia.' His operas on Thai themes, Madana and Mae Naak, have been well received by international critics. He is directing Wagner's Ring Cycle for the Bangkok Opera, a four-year project which recently received full page coverage in the New York Times.
His current project is Ayodhya, a modern opera that retells the entire Ramayana in a single evening. He has written both the libretto and the music for this spectacular work which will premiere in November 2006 and which he has dedicated to His Majesty the King

Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

3 of 4 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Historical horror, October 13, 2000

By 

"mars13" (Elkton, Virginia USA) - See all my reviews

This review is from: Darker Angels (Hardcover)

In his earlier novel, MOON DANCE, Somtow created a nightmarish American epic: a tale of the clash between European and Native American werewolves. In DARKER ANGELS he makes a triumphant return to his alternate history where magic and shape-shifters (were-leopards this time around) are real.

At about 200 pages less than MOON DANCE, DARKER ANGELS is in many ways the more successful novel. I must also note that it contains one of the most successful uses of a non-linear narrative I have yet to encounter.

This is not a book for anyone looking for a light and easy horror/dark fantasy read. It deals unflinchingly with war, slavery and homosexuality. But I highly recommend it for readers who aren't afraid to brave the darkness to find the riches therein. DARKER ANGELS may be a work of fiction, but there is more truth in its pages than in many non-fiction history books.

5.0 out of 5 stars Complex Civil War Alternate History Rewarding When Savored, November 24, 2009

By 

W. D. Gagliani (Milwaukee, WI USA) - See all my reviews

This review is from: Darker Angels (Paperback)

What a rich and diverse tapestry is S. P. Somtow's Darker Angels, a dark novel of the Civil War that's told as a phantasmagorical series of stories within stories like concentric rings. There's really no way to do justice to its structure in this brief description, but it must be said that such a potentially intrusive device here causes no confusion and indeed takes nothing away from the desperately grim beauty of the words that make up each and every narration.

From the strange beginning, in which the recently widowed Mrs. Paula Grainger meets Walt Whitman while clandestinely visiting the body of the just-slain Abraham Lincoln, to the whirling, wild, wonderful stories of the war later told by Whitman and his young friend, Zachary Brown, and then the stories told by those within the stories ... about the elderly voodoo prince, Old Joseph, who as a free slave raises black Union soldiers from the dead for one last skirmish, and the boy preacher who may have killed his own father, Jimmie Lee Cox, and Tyler Tyler, the young soldier with no arms, and bewitching Phoebe, the voodoo priestess who holds the power to transform herself into a black panther, and finally re(folding) back onto the Reverend Grainger--whose correspondents include Edgar Allan Poe, Lord Byron, and the President himself, and who is not at all quite the way his wife thinks him to be.

This is a novel of transformation, of being, of death, and of living the true life that only the grimness of death can bring. It's a novel less about the Civil War than about all wars, but it is quite specifically a Civil War novel, in which the richness of the themes runs like blood spilled between brothers and comrades, masters and slaves. This novel is grotesque, yet it makes such wise statements about the grotesqueness of war and slavery and religion that its own gruesomeness seems not only natural but necessary. Composer and film-maker S. P. Somtow weaves together so many disparate narrative voices yet produces a single cloth of intense beauty and rage, in which inhumanity vies with love as the fiercest of emotions. A novel such as Darker Angels cannot easily be described--it has to be experienced. It's a mystery to me that this great work of literature--yes, literature--will slip between the cracks because of its macabre subject matter. Perhaps too many critical voices need to stop paying attention to labels and focus instead on the heady work beneath this attractive cover. If you missed the first printing, by all means treat yourself to a special order--this trade paperback edition will fit easily on the shelf next to the Poe, Whitman, and Byron to which it so intriguingly refers. A true masterpiece of historical fiction, Darker Angels sings with a grim joy rarely achieved by novelists who dare touch subjects such as these.

Review originally in Chizine

--W.D. Gagliani, author of Wolf's Edge

5.0 out of 5 stars One of Somtow's most accomplished works, October 5, 2007

By 

Henry W. Wagner (Rockaway, NJ USA) - See all my reviews
(VINE VOICE)    (REAL NAME)   

This review is from: Darker Angels (Paperback)

"Stories within stories within stories! And always, it took another story to explain the one that preceded it."
--Paula Grainger, narrator of Darker Angels

Paula Grainger is the widow of Rev. Aloysius Grainger. Viewing President Lincoln's body as it lies in state, she encounters Walt Whitman, who is also there to pay his respects. A conversation ensues, and Paula invites Whitman to her home for tea the next day. Paula feels something important has just happened, but doesn't realize the tremendous change she is about to undergo--her chance meeting with Whitman will utterly transform her, as secrets are revealed and lives are irrevocably changed.

Whitman arrives the next day accompanied by his lover, former Union soldier Zachary Brown. Brown tells Paula a story about a past encounter with her husband, and unleashes a torrent of related tales, each illuminating mysteries raised by its predecessor. Zach's narrative is composed of several second hand tales, related to him by the Rev. Grainger, the armless Tyler Tyler, faith healer Jimmy Lee Cox, and a wealthy slaver named Bledsoe. These stories are further amplified by letters from the Reverend to Paula, which in turn reference epistles and diaries from Edgar Allan Poe and Lord Byron.

The stories weave a bizarre tapestry of voodoo, slavery, war, death and resurrection. It dawns on Paula that she is being told these stories for a reason; she eventually realizes that they represent a plea from her husband from beyond the grave. Paula needs the information to make an important decision, which, when made, provides an uplifting and quietly appropriate ending to this fine novel. Along the way, Paula sheds her old life, and, like the zombies that populate this dark fantasy, is resurrected, her mind opened, her sexuality awakened, her path made clear.

Somtow is in total control of his material, deftly combining the fantastic and the historic, expertly melding the numerous subplots he sets in motion. The cascade of stories holds the reader spellbound--each story springs from its precursor and leads into its successor, creating a complex labyrinth which the reader explores with Paula. The book is full of intriguing contrasts--the idea of raising the dead is repulsive, but pales next to the atrocities committed by both sides during the Civil War. In Somtow's world, resurrection can be horrible, but also redemptive, as when Jimmy Lee Cox brings his father back to life and reconciles with him, foreshadowing the book's touching climax.

Rich in character and atmosphere, Darker Angels is dark fantasy at its finest, a passionate work that reflects the fierce intelligence of its talented creator.