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kjcharles's review
Another Charles Williams occult thriller. These are an acquired taste ie chocker with mystical visionary religious gibbering, while also managing good characters, some proper horror, and excellent ideas. Williams has a particular knack for really nasty villains--nasty in petty malice as well as great world-destroying schemes--and for the kind of weakness/selfishness that turn people into villains without them ever really intending or thinking about it. And when I say people I mostly mean men: he's very good on portrayals of toxic masculinity in various forms.
This is of course partly because he majors in women who become saintly spiritual self-abnegators, and this book has an amazing case of that as the heroine resigns her will to the Higher Powers in a frankly quite creepy way if that isn't your idea of religious exaltation. It feels like a death cult to me.
What is great is the McGuffin--the villain gets hold of the Stone of Solomon from its Muslim guardians. There's some incisive and funny stuff about the chaos it would cause if someone really was marketing a magical stone that can heal and teleport; there's also a major Muslim secondary character who's a key and respected part of the team that tries to retrieve the Stone, and there is a delightful absence of Christian triumphalism or denigrating of other religions. Absence of horrible bigotry is a pretty damn low threshold, I grant you, but it's still one most authors of occult thrillers fail to reach, so.
This is of course partly because he majors in women who become saintly spiritual self-abnegators, and this book has an amazing case of that as the heroine resigns her will to the Higher Powers in a frankly quite creepy way if that isn't your idea of religious exaltation. It feels like a death cult to me.
What is great is the McGuffin--the villain gets hold of the Stone of Solomon from its Muslim guardians. There's some incisive and funny stuff about the chaos it would cause if someone really was marketing a magical stone that can heal and teleport; there's also a major Muslim secondary character who's a key and respected part of the team that tries to retrieve the Stone, and there is a delightful absence of Christian triumphalism or denigrating of other religions. Absence of horrible bigotry is a pretty damn low threshold, I grant you, but it's still one most authors of occult thrillers fail to reach, so.
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