The Night Clock

Eight or nine years ago, I was sat in a coffee shop in Roppongi reading the latest Interzone on my lunch break. The next story up was called Islington Crocodiles, by a Paul Meloy. I figured I'd have time to squeeze it in before having to go back to work. It blew me away, and I had to reread it, slower and savouring, that evening when I got home, something I rarely do. Since then it's been a long wait for his debut novel, only partially alleviated by more short stories and novellas concerned with this world of Autoscopes and Firmament Surgeons (come on, you know those names alone are whetting your appetite) and their shocking irruptions into mundane reality.
His work has the same sense of magic being loose in the world as, say, Jonathan Carroll, but Meloy's mythology is far grimmer and wilder, with apocalypse forever looming. This novel is the story of how one small group of people come together to stave that apocalypse off, for a little while at least.
Well written, positively fecund with grotesque imagery, this is essential reading for anyone interested in dark fantasy and horror. My only grumble would be to wonder how much is readily understandable to people who haven't read the preceding shorts (there was a small press collection, also called Islington Crocodiles, but it is long out of print), as a huge amount of characters from them make appearances. Doubling the length of the book and working some of those shorts in as a fixed-up first half might not have been a bad idea? Even without that prior knowledge this is still a superior read that fires the imagination.