The Ghost, aka Gabriel Cross the rich party throwing 1929s NYC playboy, is up against a new steampunk enemy. Giant mechanical raptors, with human skin bat-like wings, are stealing people off the streets of the city. The Ghost is trying to find their lair, but is having little luck. Gabriel's friend Felix Donovan, a NYC police inspector, is also on their trail. But suddenly, the police Commissioner and a NY Senator pull Donovan off that effort, and they put Donovan on the trail of British Spy, a spy with information that could turn the 1920s Cold War between the US and Britain into an all out war. Meanwhile, the British spy is trying desperately to avert a war between the two countries. All is not as it seems, as someone is pulling the strings from behind the scenes, engaging The Ghost, Donovan and the spy into a breakneck perilous search for the mastermind to put a stop to all the mayhem.

I once again enjoyed the nonstop action in the 1929s steampunk thriller. I'll need to find a copy of the next volume of the series. ( )

I have not read Mann's first novel about The Ghost, Ghosts of Manhattan, so I'll go drone, waffle, blegh. However I have just finished Ghosts of War. So here's a little review of it.

Gabriel Cross, millionaire playboy and ex-soldier, is also The Ghost, a mysterious vigilante who patrols the rooftops and skies of 1920's New York, righting wrongs and performing deeds of derringdo. So far, so Batman. But then Mann introduces the Steampunk elements that skew the story into an alternative reality where Queen Victoria has only recently died, her daughter Alberta is on the throne, and Britain and America are locked into a deadly cold war. Flying automatons called Raptors are abducting people seemingly at random. A British spy is on the loose with dangerous information. And a crooked Senator is spoiling to start war with the British Empire.

Mann then ramps it up even more by going all Lovecraftian and confronting the reader with nightmare creatures from another dimension, who like the taste of human blood. Oh and a leper who has replaced his limbs with mechanical ones of his own design. By himself. Yeah, me too. How the hell he wired them into his nervous system so that his brain can control them is ever explained. In fact the are some major plot points that are never satisfactorily explained.

Mann's writing is pedestrian and he has a tendency to repeat the same character motivations over and over through the book. Yeah, Cross is a war damaged, driven vigilante mourning the loss of his lover, I get it. No need to repeat ad infinitum.

This is basically 21st Century pulp fiction. Moving Steampunk away from Victoriana into the decadence of 20's New York is a nice idea, but he never comes close to capturing the hedonism of that decade, and his ideas are half formed and ill-thought out.

So, a noble failure then. It's okay if you like this sort of thing, but I'm sure there are better Steampunk novels out there. ( )

No. ( )

Oh my goodness, it gets worse. All five points I described in my review of Ghosts of Manhattan are turned up to 11 in the second volume of Mann's The Ghost adventures. Even with my level of OCD in having to complete books that I purchase, I had to stop a little over halfway in. I tried to keep pushing and pushing, but I was afraid that George Mann would kill my love of reading before bed.

This is clearly not a review, but a comment. Everything I noted about Mann's first Ghost story holds doubly so for Ghosts of War. I can't wait to get these out of my house. Sorry, George. ( )

(Reprinted from the Chicago Center for Literature and Photography [cclapcenter.com]. I am the original author of this essay, as well as the owner of CCLaP; it is not being reprinted illegally.)

Regular readers will remember last year's Ghosts of Manhattan, from genre veteran and Doctor Who scriptwriter George Mann, and how I found it only so-so when originally reviewing it myself; and now its sequel is out, Ghosts of War, which I decided to go ahead and read as well, partly because a copy was nicely sent to me by our buddies at Pyr and partly because I've always suspected that I didn't give the first volume a fair shake. And indeed, the good news is that this "Art Deco Steampunk" actioner came off this time as much better than the original, I suspect partly because both Mann and myself have grown more into these characters and setting; for those who don't know, it's set in an alt-history 1920s New York, in which a Shadow/Batman-style crimefighter is assisted by lots of fanciful tech gear, while facing complications not from German spies but ones from a still-strong and now antagonistic British Empire, who has been locked into a cold war of sorts with the US for decades on end by now. Of course, in my defense, it's also clear that this sequel is simply better than the original as well, and very specifically addresses some of the problems that I mentioned about the first book; for example, while I found what Mann actually did with this milieu in the original to be rather uninspiring, this time he comes up with a real corker of a dilemma, one I'll let remain a surprise but let's say ties in nicely with the work of HP Lovecraft, who in real life was writing his best-known stories right in these same years. Essentially more of the same but now just a little sharper, a little brighter and a little smarter, it comes recommended to both traditional steampunk fans and aficionados of Early Modernist noir serials, a rousing thriller that stands strongly against the Victorian setting where most of these types of novels are usually placed.

Out of 10: 8.4 ( )