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A review by flying_monkey
Creeping Jenny by Jeff Noon
adventurous
dark
mysterious
tense
slow-paced
- Strong character development? It's complicated
- Loveable characters? No
- Diverse cast of characters? No
- Flaws of characters a main focus? Yes
4.75
Jeff Noon announced himself years back with Vurt, a book which no-one really knew how to categorise, featuring as it did, humanoid dogs in an alt-future Manchester, music and pervasive drug-taking, in particular 'feather', the gateway to other worlds. Perhaps it was science fiction? Perhaps it was urban fantasy? Perhaps it was slipstream? Or the New Weird? It was certainly too ill-mannered and dirty to be like the experiments of Borges or Calvino. Perhaps he was the new William Burroughs?
Vurt was a success, but apart from the direct sequel, Pollen, his books afterwards sold only to a committed cult following. But they remained excellent. And very strange. Nymphomation and Falling Out of Cars in particular. I also really liked Mappalujo, the linked story sequence he wrote with Steve Beard. However in 2017, he started on a new sequence of detective novels, featuring John Nyquist. But as you might imagine, this is no ordinary detective series. Nyquist stumbles around through metaphors and allusions not knowing what he is investigating or even who or where he is half the time. The first novel, A Man of Shadows, was set in a city made up of three areas: the artificially bright Dayzone, the dark Nightzone and the mysterious and dangerous, Dusk. The second, The Body Library, saw Nyquist living in Storyville, a city made up of words and letters and encountering horror within.
The latest, Creeping Jenny, is like something that mixes up Calvino, Burroughs and The Wicker Man. Nyquist has turned up in the mysterious English village of Hoxley, looking for his father who vanished into Dusk when Nyquist was still a boy, and died, but who seems now to be alive again here. The village with its cast of rural characters is dominated by a never-ending parade of randomly selected local saints' days, each of which imposes bizarre restrictions on the residents (on one day they can't talk, on another they are asurrounded by an individual fog, on yet another, things can only be half-completed, and so on). Hovering at the back of all this are the sinister legends about the demonic Clud family, builders of a mysterious tower, and 'Creeping Jenny' a plant-like spirit that infilrates and connects things together. This is a really inventive and effective work that like the previous ones in this sequences builds on and goes far beyond its influences. It's creepy, weird, disorienting, superbly written and a lot of fun all round.
Vurt was a success, but apart from the direct sequel, Pollen, his books afterwards sold only to a committed cult following. But they remained excellent. And very strange. Nymphomation and Falling Out of Cars in particular. I also really liked Mappalujo, the linked story sequence he wrote with Steve Beard. However in 2017, he started on a new sequence of detective novels, featuring John Nyquist. But as you might imagine, this is no ordinary detective series. Nyquist stumbles around through metaphors and allusions not knowing what he is investigating or even who or where he is half the time. The first novel, A Man of Shadows, was set in a city made up of three areas: the artificially bright Dayzone, the dark Nightzone and the mysterious and dangerous, Dusk. The second, The Body Library, saw Nyquist living in Storyville, a city made up of words and letters and encountering horror within.
The latest, Creeping Jenny, is like something that mixes up Calvino, Burroughs and The Wicker Man. Nyquist has turned up in the mysterious English village of Hoxley, looking for his father who vanished into Dusk when Nyquist was still a boy, and died, but who seems now to be alive again here. The village with its cast of rural characters is dominated by a never-ending parade of randomly selected local saints' days, each of which imposes bizarre restrictions on the residents (on one day they can't talk, on another they are asurrounded by an individual fog, on yet another, things can only be half-completed, and so on). Hovering at the back of all this are the sinister legends about the demonic Clud family, builders of a mysterious tower, and 'Creeping Jenny' a plant-like spirit that infilrates and connects things together. This is a really inventive and effective work that like the previous ones in this sequences builds on and goes far beyond its influences. It's creepy, weird, disorienting, superbly written and a lot of fun all round.