First Pre-Pub Review of “City of Dark Dreams” is a Rave!
On top of the pub date announcement and cover reveal of M. G. Turner’s City of Dark Dreams: Tales from Another New York we shared a few days ago, the story collection just got its first advance review, from Publishers Weekly’s Booklife section, and they loved it!
“’The mystery is far more beautiful than any neatly presented fact that can be easily confirmed or denied,’ declares the narrator of the first tale in this marvelously unsettling collection of supernatural tales. That love of the mystery itself powers Turner’s interconnected stories set in an uncanny New York City’s Upper West Side. Turner’s people find themselves drawn into strange and unexplainable encounters, haunted by dreams and the dead, consumed by grief, loneliness, ambition, and the desire to understand what lies beyond the limits of human knowledge. The author’s nom de plume brings to mind M.R. James, that turn-of-the-20th-century master of the ghost story, and the storytelling here echoes both James’s work and the literary traditions from which it emerged. One tale, ‘The Witching Hour,” opens as if it has been crafted to read aloud around the hearth: “Believe me when I say the following passages are not for the faint of heart, but rather for those whose nerves can handle an elaborate examination of psychically damaging phenomena.”
Despite some brilliantly realized old-school prose stylings, Turner’s stories move briskly and prove too spiky, surprising, and ambiguous—and even contemporary in their concerns—to be treated as plummy throwbacks. Here, all-too-relatable characters create the conditions for their hauntings through their deepest desires, and death looms over every entry. “The Botanist” follows a mother seeking contact with her dead daughter through a Spirit Flower, “The Second Wife” finds a scientist possibly recreating his dead wife, and “Stage Fright” concerns an actor who sees his own dead father while playing Hamlet.
Turner also uses uncertainty to deepen that sense of mystery. We never really find out whether the Minotaur actually exists, the stone eagle truly moves, or the lost manuscript possesses a will of its own; unlike much 21st century genre-fiction, that welcome ambiguity denies readers the false comfort of the unknown being made explicable. Turner’s cast proves deeply, revealingly human as they yearn to understand, control, and escape what ultimately lies beyond our control—and perhaps it is the mystery itself that gives life meaning.
Takeaway: Unsettling stories of an uncanny New York and its haunted inhabitants.
Great for fans of: Robert Aickman, Ramsey Campbell.
