Vellum: The Book of All Hours
by Hal Duncan

It’s 2017 and angels and demons walk the earth. Once they were human; now they are unkin, transformed by the ancient machine-code language of reality itself. They seek The Book of All Hours, the mythical tome within which the blueprint for all reality is transcribed, which has been lost somewhere in the Vellum–the vast realm of eternity upon which our world is a mere scratch.

The Vellum, where the unkin are gathering for war.

The Vellum, where a fallen angel and a renegade devil are about to settle an age-old feud.

The Vellum, where the past, present, and future will collide with ancient worlds and myths.

And the Vellum will burn…

Note to self: when blurbs on the cover of a book proclaim it “mind-blowing” — not just once, but twice — it’s a good indication that you’re going to spend much of the book trying to figure out exactly what’s going on. And I don’t mean that in a good way, like you would with a mystery.

Given the elements woven together into Vellum — Sumerian and Greek mythology, alternate realities, emerging mythic archetypes, the intersection of science and magic — it should have been a real winner for me. Duncan has (successfully, I suppose) filled the gap between H.P. Lovecraft and William Gibson, and taken on a chapter-by-chapter basis, it can be quite engrossing (my favorite chapter, Prometheus Found, told entirely through journal entries and correspondence, is hardly less than a paean to Lovecraft himself), but all together it’s all so deliberately disordered and opaque that it made reading a real chore.

I have not read any real reviews of the book, but the odd comment here (other than what’s on the back cover) and there suggested to me that Duncan chose style over story, and that’s certainly the case. I certainly can’t disparage his stylistic competence; he’s a good writer, even if he does tend to favor too much the modernistic conceit of writing in the present tense. It’s clear that every ambiguity in the book — multiple characters with the same name, divergent timelines, shifting geographies — is done with purpose, in accordance with the very nature of the world that Duncan’s imagined.

But I don’t like books that leave me thinking, “Okay…who’s that now? And how are they related to that other person?” I don’t mind working hard for a good story, but since this story is only half-told (the second volume, Ink, will becoming out sometime soon), I’m not even sure this story is a good one, and frankly I’m not holding much hope. I feel no real attachment to the characters (except maybe Finnan, and then only after his transformation at the end). The events are disjointed, with the tenuous connections between them only beginning to be illuminated by the end of the book. It’s impossible to build up any sort of anticipation about what might happen, because just as soon as you think you’ve got things figured out, Duncan adds something completely off-the-wall, so expectations are useless.

I am sure some people (people who read James Joyce for fun, likely) enjoy books like this where style takes precedence. Me, I like my stories clear and unobstructed by the showmanship of the author.

Upcoming:
Ysabel by Guy Gavriel Kay
Blood and Thunder: An Epic of the American West by Hampton Sides
Daughter of Fortune by Isabel Allende
The Worm Ouroboros by E.R. Eddison