I doubt whether any book would entice me more than a horrible hybrid of crime fiction, speculative fantasy, weird religion and postmodernism. If that makes Jeff Noon’s third outing of the private detective John Nyquist sound like a niche affair I apologize, as it is a rollicking and goose-flesh- inducing novel.
Writers such as the late Gilbert Adair have already used the forms of the murder mystery to explore avant-garde ideas, especially in his Evadne Mount trilogy. Noon — the author of those modern classics Automated Alice and Vurt — has created the ultimate mash-up with his Nyquist novels. There is a small joke for bibliophilic readers on the back cover. Whereas normally one gets simple descriptors (Memoir/ History/ Crime/ Travel), Creeping Jenny has ‘File Under: Everyday Saints /Not the Ravens /Fatherland /Written in Blood.’ In a way, that says it all.
You do not have to have read the previous novels, A Man of Shadows and The Body Library, to be entranced by Creeping Jenny, although there are some references to previous events. The opening pages set the atmosphere. It is 1959, and Nyquist pulls down his trilby. He is looking for the village of Hoxley-in-the Hale, having been sent a series of enigmatic photographs.
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