KIM NEWMAN – The Man from the Diogenes Club.

MonkeyBrain Books. Trade paperback original, June 2006.

   Richard Jeperson, a member of the little-known Diogenes Club and investigator of peculiar crimes, often in collaboration with the exotically beautiful Vanessa and commonsensical former policeman Fred Regent, was created by Newman in his pre-professional days, then revived in the 1990s in a series of stories (often of novella length) that have now been collected by an enterprising American small press publisher.

   I would like to have been able to greet this bizarre collection with some warmth, but I must report that it took me several months to make my way through Newman’s elaborate prose that, at times, brought me to the point of tossing the book in a box of discards, unfinished and unloved. Or at least by me.

   I’ve a high tolerance for the outré, to which several shelves of occult fiction mutely testify, but Kim’s ornate descriptions tended to make my progress slower than that of the proverbial snail and undercut much of the pleasure I might have taken in the fanciful tales of mummies, zombies, and a wayward golem, all of them preserved in intractable amber-like prose.

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[EDITORIAL COMMENT.]   The book Walter reviews is now out of print, and commands a premium price on the secondary market. (I always wanted to say that.)

  Contents:

      End of the Pier Show
      You Don’t Have to Be Mad
      Tomorrow Town
      Egyptian Avenue
      Soho Golem
      The Serial Murders
      The Man Who Got Off the Ghost Train
      Swellhead