The Oversight, Charlie Fletcher's new novel, ships today. It's a dark and glinting book set in Victorian London, a fat and aggressively readable novel about a secret society — the Oversight — charged with the policing of all the magical and supranatural (yes, supranatural) elements of Britain. The Oversight are nearly extinguished, having collapsed in a great Disaster a generation before, and now they may be at their final moment.
Fletcher's alternate Britain is a perfectly creepy and mysterious place, where conspiracies nest within conspiracies and haints and grotesque monsters lurk in the hedgerows and the shadows and the gables, abetted by lunatic scientists, cruel witchfinders-turned-solicitors, circus showmen, and other romantic and sinister persons.
It's full of clever blendings of real history and imaginary embellishments, of artifacts that sound real but aren't and artifacts you'd swear were made up but turn out to be real. It's beautifully researched, and told in a kind of compelling and hypnotic poesie that I just lapped up.
In The Oversight, the world is on the verge of ending, though most people don't know it. The hordes of cruel, magical beings, pushed to the brink by burgeoning modernization, are ready to devour humanity and all its works. All it takes is for the greedy and ignorant normals out there to abet their work, and the Oversight will drop below its critical strength and vanish.
It's the first volume in a series and it has a very satisfyingly frustrating ratio of loose ends tied off to loose ends left flapping. I'll certainly be reading the next one.
