t is late in the year 1835, and New York City resident Archie Prescott has high hopes for his future, despite his current poverty. Dreaming of becoming a newspaperman, Archie tends to hang out with those who can help his career, rather than spend his evening hours with wife Helen and daughter Jane. Thus he's absent the night his slum tenement burns down, killing Helen and Jane. Arriving on the scene in time to view their corpses, Archie is emotionally undone.
But what he does not know is that the fire was deliberately set, in a magical ritual intended to consecrate his daughter to an ancient Aztec deity. Jane—scarred, abducted, another corpse left in her place—still lives, in the grip of the perpetrator, Riley Steen, a traveling mountebank with more real powers than the world credits. Steen has been planning for decades to inaugurate a new era in North America, bringing back the cruel old gods of Central America. His plan will come to fruition in seven years, on a certain cosmically propitious day.
We jump ahead those years, to 1842. Archie is a grieving drunkard wasting his days, his entry into journalism having stalled at the level of typesetter. But soon he will be shocked out of his self-pitying rut. Deep in the tourist attraction of Mammoth Cave in Kentucky, the enslaved black man who is the cave's paramount guide, Stephen Bishop, discovers a burial chamber housing a withered mummy. This is the chacmool, the agent who will assist Steen in birthing the new era. Steen buys the mummy from Bishop's owner and installs it in P.T. Barnum's New York museum. There one night, Archie witnesses the mummy's rebirth into a fearsome killer creature. Now the next few months of Archie's life will become a pilgrimage of pain and fear, sacrifice and bravery, as he seeks to thwart Steen and the chacmool.
Assaulted and left for dead by Steen's hireling, the vicious Dead Rabbit gang member Royce McDougall, Archie soon picks up Steen's trail. Harsh and slow travel, plagued by various attacks and misfortunes, eventually brings Archie to Mammoth Cave, where the sacrifice of his daughter will usher in a supernatural empire with Steen at its head. Assisted by a dead man named John Diamond and by such supernatural guides as the ghost of the Indian chief Tamanend, who when living thwarted an earlier Aztec incursion, Archie finds his last obstacle is Stephen Bishop, who has been promised his heart's desire by the chacmool. Can Archie bring the inherently moral Bishop to his senses? Or will Jane perish on the subterranean altar, thus dooming mankind? And will Archie himself survive?
A dazzling debut novel of old New York
This is Alex Irvine's first novel, and marks him as a talent to watch, confirming the prospects of his earlier short stories. Irvine boasts a calm, confident, authoritative authorly voice, capable of rising several notches during suspenseful moments. He exhibits a sure hand at plotting and manages the tricky task of inserting prodigious amounts of research material—both on the Aztec culture and on his historical milieu—into his narrative without encumbering it with infodumps or slowing down the story. His empathy for his characters is quite palpable as well, and he crafts psychological portraits that ring true to life, whether of the main personages or of minor ones. Finally, he wisely avoids a lazy over-reliance on historical figures, using Poe, Barnum and others as colorful window-dressing while focusing more creatively on his invented characters.
One of the blurbers on this novel, Kage Baker, makes the inevitable comparison to the work of Tim Powers. Of course, once Powers is mentioned, the name of James Blaylock immediately comes along. And I'd cite Harvey Jacobs for his magnificent American Goliath (1997) as another touchstone. All three of these men have done notable work in the subgenre loosely identified as "steampunk." But where Irvine diverges from these antecedents is in the extreme darkness of his vision. Unlike Powers, Blaylock and Jacobs, Irvine chooses not to leaven his tale with any humor or irony. All is sober and grim. The closest thing to a laugh occurs when Archie is riding a riverboat and the captain is mooned by a sailor on a passing craft. But this ribald display is immediately met with pistol fire from the captain, and the incident devolves into a depiction of insanity: "Only a madman would react in such a way to an incident he himself had provoked."
When the catalogue of injuries sustained by Archie and others is totaled up, the sum is impressively grand guignol. From the burning of Jane that opens the novel to a certain climactic stabbing, we encounter ear-chewings, blindings, crushings, drownings, dismemberment and other horrific bodily insults. Sure, the 1800s were in some sense a more barbaric period than the present and, to be impressively cosmic, Archie's quest must include some suitably dire trials. But where is the tenderness or laughter? Even Archie's rescue by a boatload of cheery pioneers turns sour, as if Irvine seeks to undercut even their charity. The effect is rather like watching Jim Jarmusch's similarly brutal masterpiece Dead Man (1995) without any of Jarmusch's offsetting drolleries.
Far be it from me to impose my worldview on any author. Irvine brilliantly orchestrates Archie's challenging and bloody odyssey, and his denouement rings true, with earned victories that stir our hearts. But I merely argue retroactively for what could have been a bit more balance between light and dark in an otherwise engaging and thrilling book.
