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Hyperkinetically bonkers. Time paradoxes, ancient Egyptian sorcery, a plot to own the world, cavorting sentient flames, rampant hair growth, period murderers, London underbellies, migrating souls, double-identities, doppelgangers, surgical excesses, and ... laudanum-soaked 19th-century romantic poetry. Yes, this is a book about literature and don't you forget it. Even if the breathless chase sequences and non-stop action might make it easy to. Perhaps the rollercoaster plotting, the endless implausible chance configurations this necessitates, the sheer scope of story crammed in, the inevitable plot holes, perhaps it's all just much too much. But then it'll pause on a dime to be sidetracked by some historical note on Coleridge or Byron and there's an odd charm to it nonetheless. And for all the it's never long before the gears of plot churn up a set piece so rivetingly odd and original that I can't help but be impressed.

And where's this particular understanding of magic and its elemental and lunar idiosyncrasies coming from? It's not one I've run into before, but then I'm not much of a fantasy reader. Great heroine, too, despite the period trappings; I wish she got more page time. What a marvelously ridiculous ride. Many thanks to someone so erudite as Mark Fisher for giving this a section in The Weird and the Eerie, which I read meer days before spotting this in an overstocked book barn in my old home town while on holiday.