"Where sleeps the serpent" by Alexandra Peel

 Steam punk meets Bio punk in the first of the Beneath the Skin books.

The story is told through two alternating narratives:

The biopunk narrative follows the story of a serial killer in late Victorian Paris. It is written in long paragraphs containing many sentence fragments which sometimes use unconventional grammar, for example by dislocating subject and predicate; this creates a disjointed feel which echoes the violence of the murderer. Hugely imaginative, this narrative contains long descriptive passages in which the prose is only just this side of purple ("The crud and slime of the medieval quarter, a chaotic shambles of dreary, grubbily pale structures with their grimy, wan occupants, drinking and fighting, whoring and dying, thieving and conning, who he no more feared than a flame would a moth. Hard, grey faces staring from hard, grey doorways, retching gobbets of phlegm as he passed. Slippery-legged women raising their skirts for onion mouthed, oily haired bundles of belted coats. Cobbles of slime and weary abodes leaning to cover the sky give way to newer rubble. Upright apartments and shopping arcades of polished glass, where people of new money could press their powdered noses, and desire what the person standing next to them desired whilst wearing the latest flounced skirts and trimmed bonnets, turned collars and detachable cuffs. Boulevards running in straight lines as far as the eye could see. Black carriages drawn by horses of flesh and horses of iron flew along the fresh roads, clopping and sparking. Steam hissing from every metal orifice. Steam automobiles, steam trams, steam trains, steam horses, steam ships and steam airships. Carousels, public parks, squares and gardens and everywhere there were people, every space, every street, every room crawled with them. Cackling maws, sticky children, smiles and sidelong glances, lipstick laughs, longing looks, posing and leering and scented and stinking and jostlingandwantingandeatinganddrinkingandpissingandshittingand-breathingandlivingandlivingandli-vingand…") which resonates with the obsessive nature of these episodes. Obsession is also evident in the fact that all the 'killer' episodes are fundamentally the same (man meets girl, strangles girl), an ostinato which could easily prove tedious and the fact that the author manages to keep the reader going must be testament to the quality of the prose. It doesn't always work ("He watched and viewed and collected the sights with his irises";  "His white lab coat flapped angrily about him as he rented his hair, his clothing") but at its best, the 'killer' sections are reminiscent of Baudelaire: "Hello from the gutters of gay Paree, which are filled with scabrous dogs, vermin, mangy cats, the sick and the lame, foul men with moist trouser fronts, putrid whores and rank upon rank of the rank."

The steampunk narrative follows an airship courier as she and her crew transport a suspicious package across late Victorian India. This has a more conventional style. While the killer in the alternative narrative manufactures themselves to be a little more than human, the hero of the steampunk narrative discovers within herself superhuman powers (the subtext suggests that 'natural' = good and 'manufactured' = bad). In stark contrast to the biopunk narrative with its concentrated focus on just a single character, the steampunk sections have multiple characters, few of whom have the space to become fully developed.

The steampunk plot has a classic four-part structure. There are clear turning-points in the story at the 25% mark (when the protagonist first gets into trouble), at the 50% (when she discovers her superpowers) and at the 75% point when much of the conspiracy is explained. Towards the end of the book the two alternating narratives become intertwined but the final pages lead into the second part of what is a duology.

Some of my favourite moments:

• "Chains glinted through scarlet waistcoat buttonholes, attached to pocket watches telling time in which the owners had no interest."
• "His gaze pinned her – a lepidopterist tacking a butterfly."
• "He was a monochrome man. He liked it that way."
• "Kissing like a pair of addicts they found the bed."
• "We have a stowaway.” They swivelled their eyes around the dining room as if they might see someone they had not noticed for a day and a half."
• "He had the erect posture of a corseted parson."
• "That time between twilight and dusk when the sky hinted at the coming dark."

May 2021

This review was written by the author of Motherdarling  and The Kids of God