Most Helpful Customer Reviews
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5.0 out of 5 stars
Three superb fantasy-thriller novellas, 5 Feb 2007
Genevieve Undead is one of four Jack Yeovil (Kim Newman) books in the Warhammer world; in common with the recent Silver Nails, it is a collection of short stories - three distinct novellas each with its own plot, characters and setting, though with constant allusions to previous and earlier tales in the book and beyond. Though flagged as gothic horror, the tales could also be typified as psychological thrillers with a fantasy element, revelling in ambiguities and darkness recognisable to fans of Buffy, Interview with the Vampire, etc. Genevieve herself is the heroine and the joining element of the book, linking the three stories together. The result is a joy for fans of fantasy, horror and thriller genres alike.
Yeovil's creative license with the Warhammer world allows him to create an unusual setting - picking up on the Gothic fantasy themes of the game, Yeovil adds touches which make this world decidedly more modern, as well as constantly dark and corrupt. In fact the books do more than any other work to flesh out this fantasy world as a serious backdrop. In Yeovil's world, Chaos is not the one-dimensional monstrosity of the game, but involves a constant subterranean corruption pervading life. The other social problems of his world - serial killers, revolutionaries and reactionaries, corrupt bureaucrats, drug addiction - are distinctly modern, despite the feudal and city-state settings. "Good" barely exists in this world; the heroes are ambiguous beings on the border of corruption, their earthly interests caught up in higher events, usually against their will; sanctimoniously good characters appear as zealots or hypocrites (often both). A discerning reader will also find a lot of modern-culture references, usually with a twist - such as the Graf von Unheimlich, named after a Freudian concept, and the Trapdoor Daemon, an obvious play on the Phantom of the Opera.
The stories are very efficient with their resources, containing little which is not essential to the plot; as a result they are absorbing reads from beginning to end. They are written subjectively, from the standpoints of characters, but with the standpoint shifting every few pages; each standpoint emerges with clarity, as a real personality, and even deluded, evil and "mad" subject-positions are portrayed in an eerily realistic and convincing way. The theme of artifice and reality runs through them, with drama as the central theme of two of the three stories and the third focused on the certainty of zealotry (a favourite Yeovil theme) and the perversity it produces. It is hard to explain the stories without giving away details of plots which twist and turn like snakes in the grass; suffice to say each story has a twist in the tail and a lot of mysteries to work through.
The first, "Stage Blood", blurs the boundaries between theatre and reality. Following up where the novel Drachenfels left off, it sees a further machination of the evil count emerge to threaten Genevieve and her human lover Detlef, against the backdrop of a new, darker production of the Warhammer version of "Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde", an exploration of Detlef's own dark side, and the mystery of the Trapdoor Daemon, a chaos-creature which haunts the theatre. The second, "The Cold Bleak House", is the most mysterious of all; Genevieve joins a bizarre cast of almost stage-like characters battling over the will of the Udolpho household, characters who can rise from the dead and who act their parts like a soap opera. Finally, "Unicorn Ivory" takes Genevieve to the hunting lodge of the fanatical reactionary and passionate hunter von Unheimlich; centring on his pursuit of a unicorn mare with his servants and his inept, geeky son, the story also shows the devastating effects of his all-consuming passion for the hunt, leaving the reader with the impression that perhaps Yeovil fears the loss of artifice which Unheimlich represents. These novellas are true masterpieces.
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by Jack Yeovil
by Jack Yeovil
by Jack Yeovil
by Nathan Long
by Nathan Long
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