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2 of 6 people found the following review helpful:
2.0 out of 5 stars
The Arcanum, 5 Nov 2004
Thomas Wheeler's The Arcanum is an ambitious novel by a competent novelist. Regrettably, a story this ambitious requires more than mere competence. It requires vision, talent, skill and imagination, features that are in short supply here.The first indication that this was going to be a substandard read was right on the cover - the back of the dustjacket was lined with praise from primarily mediocre writers like Christopher Golden and Robert Doherty. The second clue is the cast of characters, a group of historical figures so overused as to have become a crutch for authors of little imagination. How many times have Doyle and Houdini been paired as erstwhile detectives? How many times has Doyle been cast as a hero of Holmesian intellect? How many times has Lovecraft come face to face with the Old Ones of his Cthulu mythos, having thought they were merely figments of his imagination? The only fresh character here is Marie Laveau, but even she had to be shoehorned into place from across space and time, seeing as she never left New Orleans and died years before 1919, when this book takes place. Wheeler comes up with half a dozen clever ideas that he tosses casually into a paragraph, magical explanations for such events as the assassination of Archduke Ferdinand and the murder of the Romanoff family, but the cleverness of these tossed-off concepts pales beneath the ineptitude of the rest of the novel. It appears Wheeler did very little research into the time period about which he wrote, or the characters with which he elected to populate The Arcanum. Lovecraft is portrayed as a sniveling madman and Marie Laveau is characterized only with dropped g's at the end of gerunds and a few "cheres" thrown in to remind us all that she is from the south. Never mind that she was an intelligent Creole woman, not a Cajun. The story itself is a ridiculous mash. The chief badman is intent on destroying the world, a pretty ridiculous proposition for anyone. Think about it - where would he live, and with whom? There are angels, demons, lost tribes and ancient artifacts. Aleister Crowley appears as a menacing mage, instead of the fusty old milquetoast fraud he truly was. Other historical figures wander wanly through the narrative without convincing us of their veracity. This is a moderately entertaining book for those who prefer their historical fantasy fiction without all that messy "history", but if you are a stickler for research, plot and characterization, move on to anything by the sublime Tim Powers and pass on The Arcanum.
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by Dan Simmons
