Customer Reviews

May Contain Traces of Magic

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Holt has written some excellent stuff. My thumbnail of his oeuvre: If you love Pratchett but can't find anything new of his, Holt will tide you over just fine. I really liked his Portable Door trilogy and its follow-on, Better Mousetrap--but not this. It's just too busy: Too many changes of dimension and snapping back and forth, too many entities that are more or less than they seem, too many loose threads. At the very start, a shopping bag eats a packet of biscuits. The hero and a friend ask each other, "Who ate the biscuits?" intermittently through the rest of the book, but they never find out and we never learn what animated shopping bags have to do with anything. And the hero trots out the standard line at the end, "I'm such a dunce, the answer was staring me in the face all along!" But the answer doesn't seem obvious to me at all, or inevitable--just something the author cobbled together to cover as many bases as he could before shipping it off to the publishers. I'm very sorry to write this: a very uneven, mostly unsatisfying read. Holt has done much better.

If I was inclined to say "Oh my God!", which I am not, I would have said it over a hundred times whilst reading this book.

The story is about Chris, a salesman of magical good such as fold-away parking spaces and instant water. From the moment that he walks into the shop of one of his clients and finds the shopkeeper lying on the floor with his head mostly hacked off by a horrible demon, who is still scarily present and sitting on the top shelf observing Chris, his life falls to pieces. He has no idea who he can trust, whether they be human beings or magical beings.

Transdimensional travel is commonplace, which complicates matters enormously, and confuses Chris at every turn, even when guided by his mysterious magical SatNav.

To cap it all, his girlfriend, Karen, is hardly speaking to him and he is lumbered with a freshly graduated, objectionable apprentice, Angela, for his sales rounds.

There is so much imaginative creativity in this story, that you can't help but enjoy it. Watch out for subtle little twists, like the reference to the copra mines of Kiribati. There is always loads of copra falling with the coconuts onto the beaches of Kiribati, but I have never heard of it being mined before!

Read it and you will have a lot of fun.

Tom Holt, as you may know, is a British comic writer. Published in 2009, this book is a rather recent romp into a strange place. That place is his mind. If you like irreverent, funny, non-scientific plays of fiction, you'll like this. I am writing this recommendation in order to get me to buy others of his books. You should, too.

So to my future self, I say, "Hi, Hope all is going well." To the others I say, "I hope you don't mind a little bloodshed."

Tom Holt's writing has progressed very nicely through the years, and this book brings the normal wit with a twist as always. Great read.

Another of Mr. Holt's supernatural books, this one with all sorts of beings involved :-)