Ballantyne, Tony -- Dream London

Another weird-London entry. Not a hidden kind of weird; weird crawls out of the financial district and starts infecting the city, mutating everything and everybody. Our protagonist-not-hero is Captain Jim Wedderburn, charming rogue, or so he insists. It stops being believable around the third repetition.

The scenery is good, but this sort of thing can't survive on scenery alone. In fact the author has a whole mess of notions he's trying to stuff in: protest and poverty and stereotypes and sex work and social inequality (financial district, remember?) With a giant heaping dose of cynicism to wash it down. (Jim Wedderburn is a pimp.) It rapidly goes overdone, both too metaphorical and too blatant. Not successful.


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