Review: Cursed Under London

Cursed Under London by Gabby Hutchinson Crouch
My rating: 3 of 5 stars

An unconvincing and under-utilized Elizabethan setting for a dark comedy that, for me, was too dark and not comedic enough, involving undead, fae, dragons, and sentient police birds.

The author has chosen to just use modern speech rather than attempt anything remotely Elizabethan for the dialog, and I think that's a good call; 99.9% of authors (probably more) aren't capable of doing Elizabethan dialog that's remotely authentic, and those who are capable still shouldn't, for the sake of the readers who are not familiar with the literature of the period. (The 99.9% who can't do a good job with it also shouldn't, for the sake of the readers who are familiar with the literature of the period, but this doesn't always stop them trying, sadly.)

The author has also chosen not to attempt to avoid anachronism, or else has done a poor job of avoiding it, probably the first one; it's amazing just how many everyday things have been invented or discovered since the reign of Elizabeth I. Business cards, for example. The fact that fish contains fatty protein and that might be good for a hangover. Boiling your water before using it to wash wounds, I would imagine. Off ramps, definitely. Passports as something every traveller needs and has. Hypnotism. Dating. Shopping bags? Not sure. Coffee, it turns out, was known in Britain by the late 16th century, though it would still have been a rare curiosity.

Even though I think the choice to use modern speech is right (both because I doubt the author could have pulled off accurate Elizabethan speech, and because even if she had, it would have made the book harder to read), I do think she could have avoided the worst anachronisms if she'd wanted to, and that the book would have been stronger for it. The anachronisms turn the Elizabethan era into scenery flats rather than a realized setting. The greatest drama of that day was fully capable of anachronism in the service of the art, and is none the worse for it, but really, the Elizabethan setting here goes to waste for lack of effort. Take out a couple of historical characters that everyone's heard of (Kit Marlowe and Shakespeare), who have minimal impact on the plot, and a brief cameo from Elizabeth herself at the end, and there's not much Elizabethan left. Honestly, very little would have changed if it had been set in almost any other era up to the early 20th century.

Speaking of the plot, I saw the resolution coming a very long way off and wasn't even mildly surprised when it arrived, with minimal assistance from the supposed protagonists, who had just been shown to be largely ineffectual puppets throughout the whole book.

Mechanically (bearing in mind that there may well be another round of edits to come after the pre-release version I read via Netgalley; I hope there is), there are some issues too. The book as a whole needs more hyphens, a few more apostrophes, and not quite so many commas (and some of them in different places, like before a term of address). A number of the excess commas are not unequivocally wrong; they're at places that are, at least, grammatical boundaries, but ones that normally wouldn't be marked with a comma. Some are, of course, between adjectives that are not coordinate, because just about everyone gets those wrong at least some of the time.

There are point of view shifts within a chapter, generally considered poor craft if you are writing in third-person limited, which the author seems to be doing.

I requested this book from Netgalley because I remembered enjoying another book by the author ( Glass Coffin ), though I think had it confused with another book by a different author, and I'd forgotten that I'd also read another book ( Wish You Weren't Here ) from this author that I didn't much enjoy because it was too dark. This one was also darker than I prefer, with an extended torture scene that I skimmed, and not as funny as I would have liked, and between that and the anachronisms and the shonky mechanics, I didn't love it. But I didn't completely hate it, and I enjoyed the hard-working, world-weary police swan Dame Isobel Honkensby (reminiscent of early Sam Vimes, though without as much personality), and a few other incidental moments along the way, so it just squeaks in for three stars.

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