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Synopsis: in fin de siècle England, a strange murder occurs and an investigator is strangely fooled.

an ingenious book! I'm so pleased that the combination of Ben and Benjamin's reviews, along with my enjoyment of the author's The Friendly Examiner, led me to search out and splurge on this hard to acquire gem. as with most treasures, the difficulty of finding it was certainly a part of its appeal. but such a small part. this is one of those books that, despite the gorgeousness of its small press production and the strangeness of its story, really shouldn't be such a niche item. Marvick's writing is as humorous and charming as it is stylized and ambiguous. his characters perplex and amuse and fascinate. his dark themes and his narrative playfulness are the sorts of themes and narratives that have been explored in a range of infinitely more popular and critically lauded books, from Night Film to The Raw Shark Texts to Hawksmoor to the stories of Borges and the films of Raoul Ruiz. and yet the book is niche, to its credit. there is something so private about its mordant humor. it's a secretive friend who half-smilingly tells you a complicated story that he expects you'll only half-understand, but he's having such a fun time recounting it that it doesn't really matter to him if you fully get the humor or the point of his story. but he hopes that you'll at least enjoy its telling.

and I did! I also understood the story. at least I think I did. or did I? well, that's sort of what the novel is all about. the power and potential of storytelling, the instability of narratives. personas put on and taken off and shifted and transformed, characters doubling and becoming different versions of themselves. signified and signifier, shallow depths and deep surfaces. the plot is a trick but the author plays fairly: clues are strewn everywhere, from the first page to the last. is the story really about the strange carpet called The Star 'Ushak', one that drinks the blood of its victims while slowly turning into a portal to somewhere terrible and bloody, a vehicle for Tamburlaine the Great's bloody return? is it really about a protagonist slowly hypnotized and undone by magicians, some playful and others monstrous, all concerned with transforming the world into their own ideal story? who can say. Marvick is playing his own game and while he wants you to enjoy that game, your understanding of the game's rules is not necessarily necessary.