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A review by twilliamson
Necroscope by Brian Lumley
4.0
Necroscope is the kind of novel that reads like it was directed by Dario Argento in the '80s. So convincing is the novel's atmosphere, ideas, and style that I can almost literally envision the film grain and the bad lip dubbing. It's a book full of grime and grit, huge ideas that don't seem like they should work at all on paper yet turn out to be thoroughly exciting and mind-warping.
Let it be said: Lumley's prose, dialogue, and narrative structure are not his strengths here. Everything in the book reads like '80s horror pulp, and that's either going to work for you or it won't, and I don't think there's anything in-between. Those that get the style will resonate with it, and those that don't will not appreciate it. The book's sexual politics are terribly dated--distractingly misogynistic at times and troublingly oversexed--but I feel this speaks more to the times and the nature of '80s horror than it is some kind of cogent statement about the relationships of men and women; it's hard for me to get mad at the book when it's so clearly just riffing hard on transgressive "vibes" common to horror as a subculture of its decade.
But clunky dialogue and bad sexual politics aside, the book is brimming with bizarre ideas so frustratingly cool that my biggest criticism is that we only get a taste of how absolutely hog wild the concepts could actually get. Lumley lays out a whole lot of world-building in the first two-thirds of the book that seem to be going nowhere and then begins to drop huge, world-breaking bombs through the entire final third of the book--like, it's a whole other kind of book at the end. The book reaches out into the abstract and bizarre to become almost pure spectacle in the very best kind of way. Regardless of whether or not any of it makes sense, Necroscope is the kind of book you just grab onto for the ride, waiting until it's over to make sense of it and salivate at the thought of more.
This book is by no means a game-changer, by no means high literature, and by no means the best vampire book or international spy thriller or superhero origin story that I've read, and yet it is one highly entertaining ride with so many bonkers ideas it earns the right to its extreme eccentricities. I don't think it's a book for everyone, and it's probably not even a book for anything other than a small, niche minority of horror readers--but if you get it, you get it, and I vibe with it straight through the Möbius continuum all the way down.
Let it be said: Lumley's prose, dialogue, and narrative structure are not his strengths here. Everything in the book reads like '80s horror pulp, and that's either going to work for you or it won't, and I don't think there's anything in-between. Those that get the style will resonate with it, and those that don't will not appreciate it. The book's sexual politics are terribly dated--distractingly misogynistic at times and troublingly oversexed--but I feel this speaks more to the times and the nature of '80s horror than it is some kind of cogent statement about the relationships of men and women; it's hard for me to get mad at the book when it's so clearly just riffing hard on transgressive "vibes" common to horror as a subculture of its decade.
But clunky dialogue and bad sexual politics aside, the book is brimming with bizarre ideas so frustratingly cool that my biggest criticism is that we only get a taste of how absolutely hog wild the concepts could actually get. Lumley lays out a whole lot of world-building in the first two-thirds of the book that seem to be going nowhere and then begins to drop huge, world-breaking bombs through the entire final third of the book--like, it's a whole other kind of book at the end. The book reaches out into the abstract and bizarre to become almost pure spectacle in the very best kind of way. Regardless of whether or not any of it makes sense, Necroscope is the kind of book you just grab onto for the ride, waiting until it's over to make sense of it and salivate at the thought of more.
This book is by no means a game-changer, by no means high literature, and by no means the best vampire book or international spy thriller or superhero origin story that I've read, and yet it is one highly entertaining ride with so many bonkers ideas it earns the right to its extreme eccentricities. I don't think it's a book for everyone, and it's probably not even a book for anything other than a small, niche minority of horror readers--but if you get it, you get it, and I vibe with it straight through the Möbius continuum all the way down.