Ordinary Monsters by J.M. Miro
…And the way a child looked at him in the harbor at Alexandria as he climbed down the gangway and into the haze. All this, all this and more, would vanish from the world with his ceasing, all this ineradicable beauty that now lived only inside him would be lost, moments as fragile as coins of light on water, and this more than any other part of it made him feel alone and sorrowful and frail…
2022’s Ordinary Monsters, Book One of THE TALENTS, by J.M. Miro, is a dense, complicated, visual feast of a book, filled with magical children, enigmatic adults, and kinetic action scenes. The stakes are high and so is the weirdness, set against a gritty, coal-smoke-tinted 1880s England and Scotland, as “the talents” wage an increasingly desperate battle to stop the drughr, an unspeakable monster from another world, from rampaging through this one.
The story starts with a runaway woman finding an infant who glows like starlight, and whose light can burn or heal. Soon, we meet Alice Quicke, a private detective who has had her own brush with the weird as a child, and Charlie Ovid, a boy who can heal from anything, even death. At Cairndale Manor, as estate in Scotland, Dr. Belghast gathers talented (magical) children together—for protection, he says, but that’s not the whole truth.
Part of the truth is that Cairndale holds an orsino, a rift between our world and another. A glyphic, one of the oldest and most powerful of the talented ones, holds the orsino closed, but this glyphic is dying, and a new one is needed to keep the worlds separated.
Everybody is seeking the shining boy, Marlowe; from the man made of smoke to the gun-toting detective Alice, to the veiled Mrs. Harrowgate, to Walter, the hairless, nocturnal litch who preys on the indigent in the streets of Limehouse.
Miro’s tale plaits together many storylines from many characters, and they stride across the late-Victorian landscape like colossi: shooting, fist-fighting, knife-fighting, fighting through the carriages, and the roof, of a train, killing each other with ropes of magic dust, healing each other with strange magics. Marlowe is at the center of the story, but he is only one of a clutch of strange and wonderful children.
- Komako is a dustworker, shaping mundane dust into weapons or bonds
- Eleanor Ribbons, “Ribs,” can make herself invisible
- Oskar creates a golem-like companion out of dead flesh,
- and Charlie, who heals from any wound.
This six-hundred-page book is complicated, moving backwards and forwards in time, shifting among characters who mean to do good, those who say they mean to do good, and those who act from arrogance and selfishness. Whether it’s Marlowe’s glowing skin, Oskar’s “flesh giant” companion, Alice Quicke with her men’s clothing, her pistols, and her watchful eyes, or Brynt, the giant silver-haired woman who protects Marlowe when he is a baby, characters are described with imagination, strangeness and virtuosity. The story reminded me, at times, of Philip Pulman’s HIS DARK MATERIALS trilogy—in terms of tone, not because “dust” is a plot element. There are similarities, but while “good” and “evil” and laid out pretty clearly in Pulman’s work, Miro’s world is not as straightforward, and things aren’t always what they first seem. Miro’s prose is nearly cinematic, and I do wonder why Disney+, Netflix or Prime hasn’t optioned this series yet.
This is my first five-star read of the year, and I’m glad it came along so early. The book ends on a cliffhanger, but I have already started The Bringer of Dust, the second book in the series.
Sounds intriguing!