The Haunting of Alaizabel Cray

London is infested with evil spirits, ‘Wych-kin’ who dominate the city south of the Thames, and are slowly spreading north. The city’s best defence comes in the form of the Wych-hunters, and amongst the best is Thaniel Fox, son of the undisputed master of the craft. Thaniel has been in training for nine years, since the age of eight, and like many of his peers, has an acute ‘Wych-sense’ that can detect the presence of the preternatural. On a routine hunt of a Cradlejack, Thaniel comes across a beautiful but dishevelled girl, apparently out of her mind. He rescues her, and unwittingly finds himself at the centre of a plot that goes to the very highest echelons of society, and to another world altogether.

There can be no denying that this book is great fun. There are scary ghouls and ghosts, shootouts galore, knife-fights, magic, Masonic cults and a cast of good guys who are necessarily good-looking and honourable, creepy or cool. It will make a cracking film, and in many ways, reading this book feels like watching a Hollywood movie, with all the inherent advantages and disadvantages of that style of writing.

Wooding’s style is a little uneven. Sometimes he serves up an image that is inventive and truly beautiful – a triangular cinema as the prow of a ship, for example – but sometimes he tries a little too hard to be poetic and fails, inducing one or two cringes. But he is undisputedly good at suspense, and at action. His fight scenes are fast-paced and vivid, and always exciting. His love of schlocky horror is manifested in the moments of stillness and darkness, when our vulnerable heroes are approached by something evil out for their blood, and while it’s perhaps easy to do so when you’re describing supernatural monsters, he succeeds with aplomb.

But there are faults even within these successes. There is nothing here that has not been done before. The story, the action sequences, the horror elements – all are derived from a solid tradition. Tried and tested ideas are popular for a reason; if, however, you desire something original, that pushes back the boundaries of the genre, you won’t find it here.

If you can accept that, and enjoy the clichés for what they are, however, you will be deeply satisfied by this book. It is a comic book in novel form, complete with spider-sense. Wooding seems to be a little confused about some of the folklore tales he is deriving from (as with Black Annis and the Incubus), and also has an imperfect grasp of grammar, which is perhaps why one of his characters can quote, ‘Curiouser and curiouser’ without being struck as any educated person of the era, before the phrase seeped into popular culture, would have been by the error. And this is perhaps the reason that his characters talk in such a stilted manner. His protagonist and the eponymous heroine speak in a very odd way, half comic-book dialogue, half upper-class English wording, with no abbreviations of any kind, and without the convincing simplicity of the former or the sophistication of the latter. This sort of oversimplified characterisation is fine for the minor characters, like the stereotyped American in his Stetson, but it’s rather awkward in the main heroes.

The plot is a rollicking old-fashioned page-turner, with all the shortcuts commonly found in fantasy – psychics to advise, magical solutions to most problems, and a bad guy who has a thoroughly dubious reason for bringing about the apocalypse but does it anyway. It’s a serviceable framework to get the heroes from one action scene to the next, and is thoroughly enjoyable if you don’t think about it too much. There are so many happy coincidences to help the heroes on their way that Wooding even makes a plot point of it, suggesting it’s owing to divine intervention. There is not much of a twist at the end, since the revelation doesn’t contradict anything before it, but there are some nice ideas behind the alternate reality of the setting. And I was very surprised that a twist I was expecting never came: I was so sure that it would be revealed that a certain innocuous character who accompanies the heroes to the showdown’s alternate ego was a certain serial killer, since there seemed to be huge signposts pointing to the twist, but in the end, it wasn’t so.

The book has many faults, but in the end, it comes highly recommended, because when we pick up a book like The Haunting of Alaizabel Cray, just as when we sit down to watch a Hollywood blockbuster or when we pick up a comic book, we accept that not everything will be quite perfect, and things will be nice and simple and obvious, and it is in that mode that we can thoroughly enjoy ourselves. This book is tremendous fun, in its idiom; all in all, it is exemplary of its kind.