Radon Daughters

What exactly this book is about I'm not at all sure that I have any plausible notion. One should certainly acquaint oneself with at least a smattering of the Whitechapel to Oxford to Cambridge geography and history before picking the book up. Also, it becomes necessary to come to know something of a (justifiably, to my mind) forgotten writer by the name of William Hope Hodgson. Further, the book is, in general, very challenging. If you aren't well-versed in many poets and writers and their most abstruse works, you will miss out on much that is of significance in this dark, meandering work. But, aside from these ambiguous prefatory remarks, the thing that grabs the reader is Sinclair's mastery of the English language. His striking poetic descriptions are worth the rest of the occult muddle. Here are a few of these lines and passages: "Night air hit their shamed, flushed faces like a cerebral insult. Rumours of tyre smoke and wet leaves. The smells by which Sileen navigated, the stink peculiar to this locality: a shed of maggots bred for fishermen, badly cured leather, forgotten dead things left on the hook." "Massive ironwork gates. An agitation of leaves: ovate, deltoid, elliptic. Promiscuously mingled..." "The curse of winter sunlight illuminating silted tributaries and overgrown paths." "...the rusty nape of evening light." "Their back-up, Rhab Adman, was scanning a low sky; a millrace of iron clouds, proletarian smoke, bad script, warnings. The beauty of horror chilled him. Destitute buildings with insurance-mascara windows, bricked entrances. A shifty, local moon with acid-erased features." "Willows to the waterline. Melancholy. A lost hour between dusk and darkness. Shadows of the advancing dead." If Sinclair's robust, poetic use of the language doesn't strike you, then I really couldn't recommend this book. It's too full of quirkiness, Brit-slang, arcana of all sorts to be appealing to most readers. - I'm not surprised at all that I'm the first to review it. - But, for what it's worth, the following passage seems to encapsulate the book's wayward theme to me: "We are the calyx of our dreams. But are they our own? In dread, we fall victim to random nightmares. Outfalls of melancholy. We fear to close our eyes."