Rosemary Jones (1)

As an avid lover of board games, specifically Arkahm Horror Files, and a reader I was very excited to give this book a try for my first Arkham Horror Files book.

It intrigued me to see that the main characters was a disabled woman who used an early type of a hearing aid, and I ended up being very pleased with the representation of a recently disabled individual as someone with a disability. The author caught the rage and heartbreak that comes with giving up a life you had planned for yourself due to a disability outside your control and watching it take things you loved about yourself and the world away bit by bit. The slow heartbreak of losing yourself to it, and the stubborn refusal to let it completely over take you.

While reading this book I enjoyed randomly coming across places and characters from the games and learning new tidbits of information about Arkham and the world around it. Seeing Pete Ashcan and Duke was a nice little touch as he is one of my favorite investigators to play as.

From the Lovecraft perspective I found this book to be the right blend of slow building dread of the original and fast paced action of the games. The first 3/4s of the novel read like a slow building suspenseful mystery, and the last 1/4th was an action packed resolution with all the twists slowly expanding.

I would recommend this to fans of the games, and those just looking for a good Lovecraftian Christmas adventure.

I received an advance review copy of this book and I am leaving this review voluntarily and all thoughts and opinions are wholly my own and unbiased.… (mer)

The Bootlegger's Dance is a more immediate sequel to The Deadly Grimoire than that book had been to Mask of Silver, although it is tied into the storytelling continuity established by both. Author Rosemary Jones had moved away from weird horror in the second volume and into more of a historical 1920s occult fantasy-adventure mode. I expected that this Christmas-themed addition would continue in that direction, but in truth, the recurrent episodes of time-travel liminality are genuinely creepy, and I liked the tone of the book overall.

The story features two viewpoint characters providing first-person narration. One is the real protagonist, Raquel Malone Gutierrez, a niece of the Innsmouth bootlegger matriarch Nova Malone who featured prominently in The Deadly Grimoire. Raquel has left her career as a music teacher after a sickness that permanently impaired her hearing. The portents in the early part of the book involve things and speech mysteriously audible on Raquel's hearing aid when their sources aren't present.

The other speaker is Paul Kopp, a minor character who had vanished during the events of Mask of Sliver, with a significant implication that he had been killed. Paul's story is contained in chapters headed "Interlude" that are positioned between the numbered chapters in Raquel's voice. Raquel has twenty-three chapters and Paul has fifteen, and hers are generally longer than his. His are a kaleidoscope of scenes at various times from the late nineteenth century to the 1960s, where he has brief encounters in the course of uncontrolled time travel as the Hounds of Tindalos (obviously, though not named as such) pursue him across recent history.

Nova Malone has relocated from Innsmouth to Kingsport, and all of Raquel's chapters take place there. Paul's interludes vary, being set in Arkham, Innsmouth, and Dunwich, as well as Kingsport. Author Rosemary Jones provides a piece of textual apparatus at the end of the book that gives a December 1926 calendar page marked with the chapters of Raquel's story, along with a listing of Paul's interludes with the years in which they are set. This latter list also specifies the cameo appearances in the interludes of a large number of Arkham Horror investigator characters, including Ashcan Pete, Wendy Adams, Carson Sinclair, Mandy Thompson, Preston Fairmont, Jim Culver, Zoey Samaras, and Norman Withers.

Jones also appends a five-page acknowledgments section to thank her publishing colleagues, sources for historical research, and family members who inspired elements of the tale. Where her earlier Arkham Horror books used the 1920s film industry as their principal backdrop, The Bootlegger's Dance pivots to focus on nascent commercial radio broadcasting instead.

I still think that Mask in Silver is the best of Jones' contributions to this series, but anyone who liked The Deadly Grimoire should enjoy The Bootlegger's Dance. It could also be gratifying as a point of entry for readers who are familiar with the characters from the Arkham Files games, and who would be pleased by their inclusion as "Easter eggs" in a story that ties them together and often shows them in earlier or later life history, relative to their 1920s game identities.… (mer)