A review by guypaul
The Purple Cloud by M.P. Shiel

3.0

Shiel has a marvelous vocabulary - his sentences are beautiful, but the plot of this story bogs down midway. The descriptions of ship after ship, city after city become tedious, and some of the action seems beyond the means of the characters described. I was reminded of "Frankenstein" and "20,000 Leagues Under the Sea" in the sense that the flourishing style of the author is sometimes neglectful of the aspects of realism necessary to make fantasy believable. I think it's all well and good to describe fantastic occurrences, but when describing those of human nature, it is important to stay within the bounds of nature. To displace the mechanics of the mundane is to dilute the impact of the bizarre.