Wayward Souls (Harker & Moriarty)
Wayward Souls is the sequel to Strange Beasts, novels set in a fictional world featuring descendants of characters from Bram Stoker’s Dracula and Arthur Conan Doyle’s Sherlock Holmes series.
This instalment picks up from where the first novel ends. It is the early years of the 20th century. Samantha Harker, Helena Moriarty and Jakob Van Helsing are employed by The Royal Society for the Study of Abnormal Phenomena based in London. When four men disappear in mysterious circumstances in Ireland – two of them field agents for the Society – the trio is sent out to investigate, and a complicated story unfolds with many eerie and unsettling twists and turns. With the Irish Separatist Movement growing in strength, feelings against the English are strong and initial hypotheses suggest that the disappearances may have been politically motivated. However, it soon becomes clear that supernatural forces are also at work.
The novel is steeped in a world of Irish folklore and mythology – and there is certainly lots of it (the Dobhar-Chú, the bean-nighe, the sluagh, the Ceol Sidhe, the Morrígan, the Wild Hunt). These references are always interesting although sometimes a bit bewildering in their profusion. There are numerous narrative strands, some, though, hard to follow and not all of them adequately developed. Individual scenes – with some genuinely creepy occurrences as well as some powerful moments of disturbing horror – are arguably more effective than the overall narrative drive with the reasons for events and their inter-connections often unclear – at least for this reader.
Overall, I did enjoy this novel, and it is worth reading particularly for its Irish setting. It can be understood without reading the first novel, but I feel that starting with Strange Beasts would make more sense of the character dynamics and back-stories. An entertaining, if flawed, slice of modern Victorian Gothic.
