The Changeling

This was a disappointment coming after The Ballad of Black Tom, which I enjoyed a lot. This novel needs a proper edit - about a third should be trimmed off - and overall it's just a very average mainstream horror novel of the kind that's been churned out in vast numbers since the 70s. There are also some very annoying tropes, such as lazy national stereotyping in lieu of character building and repeatedly referring to characters by their full family names (even though the novel is about family, there's still too much of it), wannabe-cute anecdotes about baby shit, and the Feisty Female Librarian character who seems to appear in about 50% of fantasy nowadays, as if readers didn't know that libraries and the people who run them are a good thing. I'm getting really tired of this books-are-wonderful circle jerk.

But for me the defect that really screws this novel - apart from its excessive length - is the poor sense of place. LaValle is dealing with portals to other worlds, and this is technically an urban fantasy, but he can't seem to conceive of a portal that's actually urban in appearance. Instead, the action unfolds across all sorts of contrived countryside-within-the-city venues: overlooked river islands, those big wooded parks town dwellers are encouraged to consider as akin to real forest, and so on. And LaValle's descriptions of the various parts of New York are so stilted! All these paragraphs that read like extracts from uninspired tourist brochures.

The good points of the novel are the gallows humour, which doesn't always misfire, and some set pieces with a proper weird vibe. There are times where the talent LaValle displayed in Black Tom is still discernible, which is what makes all the surrounding piffle so tiresome. I also enjoyed reading about the main character Apollo's experience as a book dealer (they don't get anywhere near as much attention as librarians in fiction, plus my dad was also a "bookman"), and no doubt there are people around who will benefit from reading about the sanity-eroding degree of police harrassment faced by black people whenever they do anything even vaguely unconventional in a public place. Finally I appreciated the way Lavalle avoided the usual British and Irish mythology you find endlessly served up in novels about this particular subject, and at least tried to take things somewhere a bit more fresh.