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Book notes - Ordinary Monsters by JM Miro
Last night I finished Ordinary Monsters by J. M. Miro - I had kind of postponed the book as it looked intimidatingly large in hardback, but in fact once I started it was quite a fast read and I enjoyed it (somewhat to my surprise as the horror end of fantasy is not a sub-genre I would normally pick up).
So the basic idea is that certain children ("talents") have a range of magical abilities, fairly circumscribed in the sense that although they can get better / more confident in what they do, they can't simply learn or acquire fundamentally new abilities - they're kind of set genetically. The book is set in the late Victorian era (1870s/80s) complete with slums, pea-souper fog and all, and the life of a child is kind of grim at the best of times. In the midst of this social mix there's a castle just north of Edinburgh where the owner gathers as many talents as he can locate - the question of his motives for doing this is one of the central themes of the book, and one's view of this keeps shifting as new information about the setup is provided. The castle has, among other secrets, a kind of portal to the world of the dead, which you rapidly learn has to be kept closed but which (perhaps inevitably) is rapidly losing integrity.
It couldn't be called a fun read, but it's a persuasive one, and the world-building is good. Both the people and the settings are convincing, and the whole question of what exactly the talents are doing (and what happens to those "exiles" who don't sustain their talent through puberty) builds steadily through the book.
My only mild gripe is that although it felt through most of the book as though it was a stand-alone novel, all of a sudden in the last chapter or two we are suddenly introduced to the idea "oh look there's a whole second portal that we never knew about" - it feels far too much as though the publisher suddenly said "hey you know what, we could make a trilogy out of this". But it's a long and pretty much self-contained work in itself, and this extra bit seemed needless. While I enjoyed the book, I'm not sure I would go through a second one in the series, as it's a bit difficult to see how there can be much other than more of the same!
But overall, an unexpectedly enjoyable find and worth persevering with the intimidating size.