Cover 1995 Ace Books paperback edition – the edition I own

(13) SEAN STEWART –

RESURRECTION MAN TRILOGY (1995-2000)

Stephen King meets Ibsen. Trust me.” – Neal Stephenson.

Contemporary fantasy or magical realism in which magic comes bubbling back into our world as a wild and uncontrollable elemental force, coalescing as beings from the force of Jungian collective unconscious.

And it is very much Jungian collective unconscious, pointed out in exposition by way of a stand-up comedy routine (a device of exposition I have not encountered elsewhere) – as opposed to Freudian, although I would like to have seen a fantasy based on the elemental forces of magic bubbling out of our Freudian unconscious.

Admittedly, I found the world-building more intriguing than the actual story in Resurrection Man, which doles out that world-building in fragments and hints – a world “profoundly altered by WWII and the increasingly monstrous magic it unleashed’, first as golems from the camps and then as minotaurs from the American ghettoes. A world in which China is superpower – not through economics as in our world, but through geomancy or feng shui.

That world formed the setting for two other books by Stewart with more intriguing stories, Night Watch and the World Fantasy Award winning Galveston. In the latter, the Texan city has been isolated and divided by the flood of magic, literally into a normal ‘non-magical’ half, scraping and scavenging its living from the increasingly derelict remnants of science or technology, and Carnival, an endless magical Mardis Gras celebration.

His novel Mockingbird had a similar theme, but on a family rather than world scale.

Sadly, after this creative flurry of novels in the nineties and noughties, Stewart moved from writing novels to writing interactive fiction or games.

RATING:
B-TIER (HIGH TIER)