Hide Me Among the Graves by Tim Powers

Premise: When Christina Rossetti smears her blood on the little statue belonging to her father, she unknowingly releases a curse upon her family: the vampiric spirit of her late uncle John Polidori, physician to poet Lord Byron. Not only does Polidori’s spirit inspire great poetry and painting to Christina and her brother Gabriel, it threatens their other family members and resurrects Gabriel’s dead wife as a vampire as well. They agree that their uncle must be stopped at all costs.

The Rossettis are not the only ones threatened by Polidori. Adelaide McKee is a reformed prostitute who had a tryst with the veterinarian John Crawford seven years earlier, producing a child who had been previously presumed dead. When she discovers that the girl is alive and in danger of being claimed by Polidori, she strikes out with Crawford to find the Rossetti family for their help to save her daughter and to stop Polidori.

Racing across Victorian London streets, riding on carriages, and climbing through dark and mysterious sewers, they all discover there are strange supernatural unseen things in their midst, and the very foundation of London is at risk. With the help of Edward Trelawney, friend of Shelley and Byron, they must track down vampires, speak with ghosts, and discover the way to stop the destruction of their loved ones and of London before it is too late. Some are willing to give up the muse in exchange for stopping Polidori, but there are others who are willing to embrace him and all that entails.

Themes: One of the great themes in Hide Me Among the Graves is sacrifice. Several of the characters are faced with sacrificing their poetry, painting, and other writings in exchange for stopping Polidori. Not every character is willing to do so, and the cost of themselves and of others. It is interesting that the sacrifice can be seen as going either way, as a sacrifice of soul and life in exchange for the muse and eternity, or vice versa.

Hide Me Among the Graves is also a redemption story, with Adelaide McKee making up for her past sins by her relentless pursuit of Polidori and her daughter, Johanna, and with Christina attempting to redeem her mistake of releasing Polidori to begin with. Crawford seeks redemption for his mistakes by following wherever McKee leads him. We even find Trelawney faced with opportunities for redemption after an entirely unrepentant lifetime.

The love story between Crawford and McKee comes into full view when they discover their daughter from their tryst years before is still alive. The steps they take to save her lead them to face their feelings for each other years after their one night stand.

Pros: Hide Me Among the Graves has exquisite characters full of depth and faults, with opportunities for failure and for redemption. The setting plays such a huge part in the story and is so well established that, even though I have never been to London, I felt like I was riding in the cabs and crawling underground right along with the characters. The supernatural elements are so full of intrigue that I felt transported to another world within a world, and was especially fearful for the characters when Polidori and the other vampires revealed themselves.

Cons: The story is thick with information and characters. I was a little confused at the beginning, not knowing anything about the book, as to what was happening and who these people are. Some assumptions are made that you will simply buy into some supernatural or magical elements without explaining why or how they work before you even know what kind of a book this is. As it progresses, however, and you learn more, they begin to make sense at least in the context of this story.

Recommendations: Using real historical figures and giving them unique personalities, this is historical fantasy at its best. Reading Hide Me Among the Graves made me feel the same way I felt after reading Jonathan Strange & Mr. Norrell for the first time. Powers places you right amongst the characters and makes you feel and fear as they do, especially when facing the supernatural and as they make new discoveries of the unknown. Pushing past Bram Stoker’s Dracula, this is my new favorite vampire novel.

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Dreadnought by Cherie Priest

Premise: Dreadnought is the followup novel to Boneshaker in the Clockwork Century series (if you exclude the novella Clementine). It is set during the Civil War, this time beginning our story in Richmond, Virgina in a Confederate hospital. Nurse Mercy Lynch is good at what she does and has seen her fair share of bloodied soldiers, but when she discovers her Union husband has been killed and her father is dying, she decides to leave for Tacoma, Washington to see him before he is gone for good.

The trip is difficult, to say the least. She has to hop a dirigible through the front lines of the battle. The airship she is on gets shot down but she is able to make it to St. Louis. From there she gets on a Union train known as the Dreadnought to travel through the vast expanse of land west of the Mississippi. The mysterious cargo it is carrying, however, draws the attention of bandits, Rebel soldiers, and an even faster Confederate train as they race to their destination over the Colorado Rockies. On the way to Salt Lake City, will Inspector Galeano discover what happened to a group of missing Mexican soldiers, and will Texas Ranger Horatio Korman learn what is in the last two cars of the infamous train?

When Mercy arrives in Tacoma she meets up with the sheriff who is supposed to lead her to her father. It is here in the Pacific Northwest that she encounters a completely different world full of characters familiar to those who have read Boneshaker. She is introduced to these new people by her maiden name: Swakhammer.

Themes: What is important to you when you are on the edge of losing everything? When she loses her husband and her father is on his deathbed, Mercy is faced with choosing what is important to her. Knowing her father and seeing him before it’s too late become the most important thing to her at this time, so the obstacles in her path are dwarfed by her desire to know the only family she has left.

This is also a story about personal growth. This journey to Tacoma is as metaphorical as it is literal as she makes important life decisions. Mercy left Richmond a strong-willed widow but her arrival in Tacoma and Seattle bring her face to face with her unknown past and an unsure future.

Pros: Mercy is an incredibly strong female lead character that can handle being on her own. She doesn’t swoon over the sight of a man, but she is also feminine and has personal conflict, all of which makes her likeable and realistic. The pacing for Dreadnought was perfect, starting with the creep of sickened soldiers and building to racing locomotives. All the story elements – airships, zombies, the steam walkers – stood the chance of being cheesy tropes, but here they are executed and woven together with a skill that makes them all believable and interesting. I liked the train plowing through hordes of zombies, but it was the giant steam-powered walkers that I really loved.

Cons: Some of the motivational conflicts between characters seemed a little forced in order to move plot points along, but when facing zombies I can see how they would make some of the decisions they did in spite of their allegiances. Since I liked the walking war machines I could have seen more of them in the story. Besides, I wanted to see a fight between a walker and zombies.

Recommendations: Dreadnought gathered steam (pun intended) beginning with the sobering realities of war and accelerating to breakneck speeds of shootouts on dueling trains. Cherie Priest took the foundation she laid with Boneshaker and created something new in Dreadnought, with a few tie-ins to its predecessor. The two stories are greatly different and you can read one without having read the other, but why would you want to? This story is a speeding juggernaut of action, mystery, and intrigue…with zombies.

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Boneshaker by Cherie Priest

Premise: Set during the Civil War, a poisonous gas is released when a burrowing contraption called the Boneshaker runs amok underneath downtown Seattle. Briar Wilkes and her son Zeke run through subterranean tunnels to find their way out of the walled downtown area to catch an zeppelin into fresh air. Throw in zombies and steampunk elements to this alternative historical fiction and you have Boneshaker by Cherie Priest.

Zeke sneaks into the walled city of Seattle to find evidence that might clear his father, Leviticus Blue, of the crimes of burrowing under the city in the Boneshaker machine, originally designed to drill for gold, and releasing a toxic blight that changes people into zombie “rotters” that roam the streets. There are still people living in the sewers who have secured entrances and have found ways to filter the gas from their underground home. They have some helpful mechanical tools that aid them in their life that Dr. Minnericht has built, but no one really knows who he is or where he came from.

The mysterious Dr. Minnericht provides the people with tools and weapons, but he is also quite unknown. It is he who Briar seeks out to find her son, Zeke, because it is rumored that he could be Leviticus Blue, but she knows that to be impossible.

Themes: The relationship between a mother and her son plays a huge part in Boneshaker. She has raised Zeke alone since her husband took the Boneshaker for a destructive joyride by working in a factory and making sacrifices of the kind that parents do for their kids. Briar is even willing to delve into a zombie-infested cesspool in order to save and protect her son from harm.

Survival is hard enough without the threat of zombies, the yellowish noxious gas, the recurring earthquakes, and living under the whims of Dr. Minnericht. In such an unforgiving world, survival takes on a new meaning. Where else do you have to cover all your skin and wear a gas mask to go out in the streets and rummaging through buildings for simple supplies?

This is also a book about facing your demons. For Briar, going into the city is a challenge not only because of the rotters, but also because it means going to the home she left behind and unearthing the memories of the things that Leviticus Blue did to bring the city to its current state. Her husband supposedly died, but her father, Maynard Wilkes, saved people in the carnage caused by Leviticus. Will the people there know Briar by the legacy left by her father or the mistakes of her husband?

Pros: Priest successfully manages to combine elements of steampunk and zombie novels into one without coming across as forced or cheesy. The characters are well done, with a strong female main character that is far from cliche, her independent teenage son without all the expected angst, a cool Jeremiah Swakhammer that knows how to survive in the city, and the towering airship captain Andan Cly that helps Briar into the city to find Zeke. Boneshaker has an atmospheric style that makes this a fun read from start to finish.

Cons: I would have liked a little more world building simply to give genre fans something more to chew on. Basically, more zombie action for the zombie fans and more steampunk elements for the steampunk fans. Any twists at the end were also fairly obvious (at least to me).

Recommendations: Needless to say, I loved this book. Even the brown printed text helped suck me deeper into the gritty world Priest has created. For people new to either steampunk or zombie books this is a good entry point for either. Others familiar with either genre (or subgenre) will be pleasantly surprised with new elements to both. This will be a flagship book for the steampunk genre, if it isn’t already.

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