The Domino Men: A Novel

I haven't read much in the urban fantasy sub-genre unless you count Neil Gaiman's Sandman graphic novels. The other thing in the genre I can remember having read recently was Edghill's "The Sword of Maiden's Tears", which was okay but almost painfully an obvious projection of its target audience's wishes (i.e. lonely nerd girls wanting a broken elven prince to fix up and fall for). This is, as Americans would say, "a whole another can of worms", and there are indeed wormy, creepy, decadent, and just plain disturbing things in it. This is an England where the royal family is being eaten from the inside by the legacy of a demonic pact and a strange addictive drug, and where a government department is secretly tasked with binding a monster that could consume all of London and worse. That's the big picture. On the personal level, there are nasty little incidents like the main character forced to watch his girlfriend under the influence of said drug have frenzied sex with a man he detests, and the titular Domino Men - two agents whose role I never quite figured out - releasing into a crowded nightclub a powder that makes people sneeze uncontrollably till they bleed out from the lungs. To me, the worst thing about this sadistic pair is that they are not actually the "bad guys". The climax of the book is a scene of citywide pollution and horror worse than the aftermath of a nuclear bomb. To save England and possibly the world, the hero, like another a generation before him, has to sacrifice himself in a way repulsive almost beyond imagining. This is not what I call "technical fantasy", the kind whose authors seem to have either gotten muddled up with science fiction, played too much Dungeons and Dragons, or both. Writers like that tend to lay out rules for how stuff happens as if there are little tables of quantitative parameters in an appendix somewhere. Despite the modern setting of the story, Barnes understands that magic doesn't follow the same rules as physics, and that fantasy fiction has to have claws deep into mystery while somehow seeming to make sense. You can't even understand why some people do what they do, and certain phenomena remain inexplicable, even at the end. After a book like this, I don't sleep well at night, but I want to read more. Make of that what you will.

In an article about the Somnambulist, author Barnes declared that book to be a tribute to things he loved: Ackroyd's London histories, Doctor Who, Victorian genre fiction and Neil Gaiman's Neverwhere. If the same is true of The Domino Men, we can add Chesterton's The Man Who Was Thursday and Grant Morrison's seminal conspiracy series The Invisibles to the list-- the book reads as a delicious mash-up of all the above and more. Nevertheless, the book stands wonderfully on its own, and will no-doubt go on to influence other authors based on its own wonky merits. Barnes's London is a vibrant, seething presence, and it's peopled with an array of characters both familiar and enjoyably offbeat. There are multiple narrators (sort of), Lurking Horrors, Secret Histories and Terrible Dooms. All-told, a delirious and compelling read.

It's not often that a sequel surpasses the original work from which it derives, but in the case of "The Domino Men" that's definitely the case. At the end of "Somnambulist", London was in ruins at the end of Queen Victoria's reign. This book picks up the story in present-day London, as the opposing forces of the epic struggle have used the intervening decades to restore their powers, so badly depleted in the previous battle. This time, a milquetoast file clerk is the fulcrum of the Directorate's strategy, as well as bringing into play those two anarchic demons - Hawkins and Boon (the Domino Men) - who sowed so much destruction at the end of the last book. Told in modern dialect (as opposed to the Victorian lingo of the previous work), all the verve, panache, and devilishly clever twists of the original continue in this sequel. Rich characterizations (the Domino Men are an absolute hoot!), tight plotting, and vivid scenery will keep you hooked from first page to last. In many ways this book reminds me of Swift's "Gulliver's Travels": using dark satire to lampoon the current socio-political climate. If you liked "The Somnambulist", you'll love "The Domino Men".

Londoner Henry Lamb was one of the vast army of civil servants, that horde of drab, slightly shabby people who are cogs in the bureaucracy that rules modern life. Among the drabbest shabbiest of those cogs are those consigned to Files, the final resting place for all of the forms, surveys, censuses, applications, registrations and other bits of information modern society seems to require. One of the few things that made Henry Lamb unique was his brief brush with fame as a child actor on a mediocre tv show, a role he had gotten not due to his own talent but only because his grandfather had written the program. The only other special thing about Henry was his landlady, a beautiful young woman who owned the flat Henry had recently moved into. Henry's drab life began to change though, and not necessarily for the better. Seemingly unrelated things began to happen, first the new flat, then a new worker in his department, then his grandfather had a stroke and then even more odd happenings. Henry discovered that he had been promoted, once again not due to his talents but because of his grandfather who had apparently been some sort of secret agent. The agency that grandfather had worked for, and that had now apparently drafted Henry was engaged in a civil war against the House of Windsor, a conflict that had begun in 1857 when Queen Victoria had signed a pact with the devil, an arrangement that had escaped public notice for the past 150 years. THE DOMINO MEN is set in modern day London, the only obvious deviations from the world as we know it are that the Queen has retired from public life, although she has not relinquished the throne, and her only son is named Arthur who is married to the beautiful but distant Laetitia. As the story progresses, leading Henry further away from the mundane world he had formerly known and confronting him with increasingly fantastic new developments this reader at least was waiting for Captain Jack and the rest of the TORCHWOOD team to appear to lend a hand. Alas for poor Henry they did not leading him to soldier on as best he could. His allies did finally arrive though from the most unlikely places to aid him in his battle to save London from the Leviathan. This is a very odd book - a seriocomic urban fantasy/horror/thriller with overtones of romance or something, whatever it might be called it is definitely a page turner with enough twists and turns to keep the reader guessing, and reading until the final sentence.

The Domino Men is a wonderful lark of a book reminiscent of the old "boys" adventure books of the late 19th century. As the story opens, we meet Henry Lamb, a sweet, straightforward young filing clerk with a rather odd grandfather who apparently works for a secret organization that battles the House of Windsor, descendants of Queen Victoria who apparently made a deal with an ancient evil, the payment for which is now coming due. After the old man falls into a coma, Henry is recruited to continue the fight. In this marvelously readable book, we meet all sorts of interesting and entertaining characters, both good and bad, and nothing was easily predictable. The final description of the monstrous Leviatian (and this is no spoiler - the monster is mentioned on the inside flap of the book!) was so unexpected and fun. I enjoyed this book very much and absolutely recommend it without reservation to anyone who loves fantasy and good writing.