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I'm sitting here trying to decide how to say what I need to say about The Strange Affair of Spring Heeled Jack, and I can't get my review of Cherie Priest’s Boneshaker out of my head. So I'm going let it inspire me:

I dug Mark Hodder’s The Strange Affair of Spring-heeled Jack, but it was too damn much.

I dug Albertan England, but the changes from the Victorian England I am familiar with were too outrageous, too far beyond what even my whacked-out imagination could accept.

I dug the loups-garous, but there were too many of them, and their spontaneous wolf-man combustion was one pseudo-Sci-Fi step too far for me to suspend my disbelief.

I dug Sir Richard Burton and Algernon Swinburne, and even Speke and Palmerston (plastic face and all) were tolerable, but throwing in Charles Darwin, Florence Nightingale, Ismabard Kingdom Brunel stretched my ability to cope. But even that wasn't enough for Hodder. No, no, no. He had to give us a newsboy, nicknamed Quips (so clever), who just happens to be a young Oscar Wilde. But even THAT wasn't enough for Hodder. Nope. The revelation of Wilde's identity came upon his first meeting with a poet named Algy a couple of paragraphs away from the books only use of the word "perambulator." Fuck off.

I dug the "new novella" at the heart of the tale -- Part Two: Being the True History of Spring Heeled Jack -- and would love to have seen all of Hodder's energy poured into that history. As a novella, it might have been nearly as good as H.G. Wells' The Invisible Man, but then there's Part One and Three and the Conclusion and the Appendix, and there is an excess of plot and action that is just begging to be streamlined and morphed into a radio play (odd, I know, but I kept hearing the story in my head with the crackling overlay of an old-time radio). I wanted to mess with it and adapt it, or beg Hodder to keep it simple and short, but he was too in love with his own cleverness, and that hurt the literary experience (if not the entertainment experience).

I dug The Mad Marquess and even dug his Mr. Belljar alter-ego, but the way he became the damn dirty ape of Burton's nightmares was ... well ... lame because of everything (such as Ms. Nightengale) that was required to make it work.

I dug Spring Heeled Jack, and I loved the way we watched his loose-ends tie up, but I wanted him to be smarter than he was. Perhaps that's not fair, though.

I dug how Burton finished the tale and made a timeline shaking choice based purely on his selfish desires, but I don’t buy for a second that it was required. The timeline was already irrevocably fucked. Still, "heroic" brutality was refreshing, and it made him feel more like James Bond than Sherlock Holmes.

I dug most of the technological steampunk elements, but I grew thoroughly weary of the eugenic steampunk elements. Again, Wells did it better when he was writing straight up Sci-Fi in the Victorian Era than any steampunk writers can do today when they ape the era for their stories. Herbert George, what would you make of steampunk?

I dug the hint of more tales with Burton and Swinburne, but I think I would rather spend some time in Damascus with Isabel Arundell instead.

I dug The Strange Affair of Spring-heeled Jack, but it was too much of a good thing and not enough of a great thing, and the only way to get to the great would have been to decrease the good because too much good winds up being just okay.

I wonder if Burton and Swinburne will take on Jack the Ripper next? Seems appropriate, and what would the Ripper be in a timeline so fantastically altered? That could actually bring me back to Hodder's Albertan past. I'll cross my fingers and toes.