In 1840 Boston, Henry Lockrose begins his studies at the Massachusetts Medical College of Harvard University. The red-haired son of a dirt farmer, Henry wants nothing more than to be a surgeon. But he has a dangerous secret, one that can get him locked up, or worse. Though he tries to keep to himself, he becomes intrigued by two people: Dorian Athelstane, a mysterious Englishman, and Finella Riley, a female student who is, shockingly, studying medicine at Harvard. Henry soon joins their coven, for which Finella serves as medium. When the coven attempts to raise a demon, the tragic results include both death and the discovery of the angel-bone instruments.

Now Dorian Athelstane wanders the world, hearing the voice of the Forgotten angel in every sound, possessed by its instruments, dispossessed of his own family. When he crosses Henry Locklear's path again, in 1850 Arizona, the red-haired man is an alcoholic bullet extractor. He's also been saving a scalpel just for Dorian. Soon Henry possesses three of the bone instruments Dorian had found, and begins searching for the rest.

In a modern Australian suburb, four-and-a-half-year-old Walter discovers there really is a monster in his closet. But, in a dream, a red-haired man with strange glowing instruments in his coat advises Walter on how to banish the monster. Walter takes this advice—then discovers, too late, that the monster in the closet was protecting him from the sinister red-haired man. Now Walter is in a coma, and his sister, Hope, is Henry Lockrose's new intended victim. To protect her, Walter merges with the monster, becoming something that is both, and neither. Now Walter is both Hope's protector and her nightmare. But he cannot physically affect the world, so he recruits an age-mate of Hope's, a boy named Suni, to help protect her. But Suni is only a fragile mortal, and Walter's intention goes dangerously awry.

Promising novel about the wrong characters

Under the name Rowley Monkfish, Australian author Cameron Rogers published a pair of young-adult titles Down Under. He followed them with his debut novel for adults, the dark fantasy The Music of Razors, which appeared in Australia in 2001 and was nominated for the Aurealis Award for Best Fantasy Novel. Now Del Rey is publishing an expanded version of The Music of Razors, rewritten to incorporate some 40,000 words of new material.

The Music of Razors displays a darkly vivid imagination, reminiscent of Neil Gaiman's. Rogers's re-envisioning of Satan's fall as a three-sided conflict is intriguingly different, and his imagery of the place where lost objects (like socks and keys) go is genuinely creepy. His inventiveness is matched by his prose skills, as in his captivating description of the vivification of the clockwork ballerina Nimble (a creation worthy of the brilliant Neil Gaiman-Dave McLean team): "Something clicks, inside the dancer ... The three-ring sphere in which the ballerina's beautiful box-heart is housed begins to slowly and comprehensively spin, building speed, faster and faster, until light begins to creep from the box. It is now a silver spheroid blur, growing brighter by degrees, and as that first scintilla of light makes itself known, so do other soft sounds come from elsewhere inside the ballerina: her joints, her fingers, the ball of her neck. As the light becomes a soft and constant glow—all of the quiet, tiny parts within her coming to life—her face slowly rises."

Cameron Rogers has great creative talents, but they do not include pacing or structure. The Music of Razors is slightly longer than 300 pages, and more than a hundred of the first 120-odd pages are devoted to several characters who could be combined or deleted with no harm to the novel. Nimble is a lovely and fascinating character, but, alas, she and her lover, Tub, are decorative, not functional. Nimble is the clockwork companion of a child, Millicent, who takes over the narrative for 30-plus pages—long enough to suggest she's a major character—then abruptly dies, with no more ultimate effect on the narrative than a stone that momentarily breaks a river's surface. Millicent is the daughter of Dorian Athelstane, who also seems at first to be a significant character—but then he too dies, leaving Henry Lockrose to assume the role of antagonist. Two vital fiction-rewriting rules are "eliminate the unnecessary" and "combine redundant characters." Dorian and Henry should have become one character before the book reached a reader's hands. And most of the backstory and its characters should have been eliminated.

Ironically, Henry Lockrose, who dominates so much of the unnecessary backstory, is underutilizied where he is needed: in the book's second half, which is devoted to the novel's actual story, that of monster/boy Walter and his sister/responsibility, Hope. In this section, the author hardly delves into Lockrose's mind, leaving readers unconvinced by his desire to replace himself as angel-bone instrument-bearer with Walter or Hope. Rogers also fails to dig very deeply into the viewpoints of his other characters, and he usually cuts away from major events (Millicent is suddenly dead and buried, for example, while Henry doesn't know how he just killed Dorian, and Hope commits her killing offstage). Avoiding the emotionally significant moments leaves the characters' behavior murky and their motivations mysterious, and reader confusion only increases as The Music of Razors speeds to its climax. The scenes shorten, the jump cuts become more frequent, and the narrative spins completely out of the author's control. Most readers who persist to the crash-sudden ending will be left wondering, like auto-accident survivors, just what the hell happened and why.