Book Review: Queen Victoria: Demon Hunter
Posted on | June 22, 2010 | No Comments
Queen Victoria, Demon Hunter
By A.E. Moorat
http://www.harpercollins.com/authors/36668/A_E_Moorat/index.aspx
-
Young Victoria ascends the throne of England, and her first lesson as queen is this: that demons are real, and they threaten the nation in a very immediate sense. Soon, the young queen herself picks up the sword, the dagger and the spinning saw axe, and does bloody battle with the fiends from hell.
While an original novel, in a manner of speaking, Queen Victoria: Demon Hunter very much reads like another offering in the recent craze for mixing so-called dry subjects with horror genre elements – a craze that tends to produce novels that are more thrilling in concept than execution. Not being constrained by another’s storyline does make the monsters in this offering more of a part of the plot, but the writing is amateurish, with scenes jumping to flashbacks and back without so much as a tense change and the language only really taking off when there is gore to be described – which, fair enough, is done with stomach-turning gusto.
Characterisation is flat when it comes to Victoria and Albert, whose fairytale romance was so poorly written it may as well have come from a pre-opening credits scene in an action movie, setting up the tragedy that would then motivate the hero – as it does in this case. This flaw does not exist across the board, though. Standing out from the rest of the cast were the entertaining duo of the amoral Lord Quimby and his zombie manservant Perkins; however, these two seem almost superfluous to the main plot. Victoria herself remains very much the bland protagonist, which is something no amount of weaponry can cure, and is also upstaged by her protector and instructor, Maggie Brown (mother of John, for you history geeks). I get the feeling this book would have been much better had it been about Maggie and the Quimby/Perkins duo, who the author really seemed to enjoy writing, too.
Given the many fun ideas in the novel, such as a zombie massacre in the Parliament, creepy street urchins, rat massacres and, well, Queen Victoria as a demon hunter, I regret having to give it only one star, but I must be honest. It was just too clumsy for more – and that’s still without going into inevitable historical inaccuracies and the demonisation of the mentally I’ll, which, while a Victorian idea and a traditional in part of the horror genre, is still a travesty.
I did find it readable, but I have a low threshold for readability, and I suppose, if given to a skilled director, it could make a fun film.
Comments
Leave a Reply
What is this? Where am I?
More?
Feed the Blogger
Polls
Loading ...
