Customer Reviews

The Werewolves of London

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Brian Stableford is probably better known for his excellent Emortality series. But this is very good stuff I enjoyed the combination of the fantasy and science fiction elements and the Victorian drawing room settings. Above all is Stablefords great imagination. He inserts wonderful new ideas and characters into the tired cliched theme of monsters loose in foggy victorian London. Good book.

Why do atheists always have to be portrayed as pompous, humorless windbags in popular fiction? Evil exists in Brian Stableford's Victorian London and there is nothing God can do about it, since he either outside of the Universe or else `is' the Universe. Only atheists seem to be able see the Universe as it truly is--and they tend to go on, and on, and on about it.

In "The Werewolves of London" the ultimate winners are: atheism; true love; Earth.

The losers are: Spiderman; Catwoman; Christianity; the Archangel Gabriel; and Satan.

Those who neither win nor lose are the Werewolves of London.

This book is 467 pages long, but if you skip through the long-winded hermeneutics on religion and magic, you could easily finish "The Werewolves of London" in a couple of sittings.

Sex is presented in such loathsome settings as to turn the reader off for life. In this respect, this book surpasses the Victorians it is trying to imitate.

There are a couple of engaging characters who are caught up in the fight of Good versus Evil: the first is an orphan boy with unusual psychic powers, who has spent the first nine years of his life with the Sisters of St. Syncletica; the second is a young man who gets bitten twice by snakes on an expedition through Egypt with his mentor, Baron Tallentyre.

The snakebites cause delirium and visions of Satan, and the young man is not safe even when he and his mentor return to London. He is soon kidnapped by the werewolves and tortured for reasons I never quite understood. S&M is a dominant theme in this book, much of it anti-Christian, some of it (as far as I can tell) just for fun.

The denouement occurs in one man's eerie version of hell where all of the characters are sorted out and universal order is restored--at least temporarily. This is an interesting book when it sticks to the plot and refrains from preaching.

Greek mythology tells of an ancient battle between titans and gods. In THE WEREWOLVES OF LONDON, Brian Stableford's ancient battle involves Creators and Others. In nineteenth-century London, the Creators are in suspended animation. Werewolves, a group of Others, live secretly using human cattle as tools for plots of domination. Over the centuries, the only good werewolf, Pelorus, has protected humans. But now Jacob Harkender, an occult magician, has awakened a Creator who unbalances the status quo with a threat of apocalypse.

On the back of the 1994 Carroll & Graf paperback edition, I read this quote: "An action-packed thriller. - Booklist."

That may not be a lie, but it is a falsehood. In 467 pages of narration, four action sequences comprise about 20 pages. Maybe that's not exactly right; maybe six action sequences comprise about 50 pages. The point is, despite its title, this novel is NOT action packed.

Its lack of action is insufficient for me to give it only two stars. I do that because unsuspecting readers looking for an exciting horror story are ambushed by pages of abstract philosophy and surrealism. This gives Stableford a chance to display his Wisdoms and Truths, but it's boring. Also, Stableford has a bothersome habit of using many words to describe little.

Nuggets of gold hide in this novel if you have the patience to pan for them. Therefore I give it two stars instead of one. I was thinking of giving it three stars, which is neutral, but I have discovered gold in other novels without having to sift through sediment. So my rating for this one is negative.

Even after reading THE WEREWOLVES OF LONDON, without the note on the back cover I would not have known that it was the first volume of a trilogy. Its story stands alone well.