Mark Chadbourn - Jack of Ravens

I'm not really up with the various generic categories but 'dark fantasy' seems a safe bet for this one - or, at least, that's what it seems to be striving for. But while Chadbourn does enough to have kept me reasonably enthralled and pulled through the novel at a rapid clip, I never felt really wrapped up, held in its threads - Jack of Ravens doesn't have the compelling weird of the best examples of its type, the troubling dreamlands of Stephen Donaldson, China Miéville and, in a slightly different vein, Mervyn Peake. It slips occasionally into overwriting - especially intrusive in the first pages - and while its ransacking of familiar myths and motifs is probably meant to lend the novel a universality revisioned, it mostly comes across as a bit familiar (Puck, the Fates in their guise as three women, the Seelie Court, Templars, John Dee, Elizabethan spies, Victorian prostitutes and figures of nightmare - I've seen much of this recently in Mary Gentle's 1610 and more in Gaiman's work, especially the Sandman series). It's not bad at all, but lacks the extra craft and sparkle that would have made it memorable.