Lord Soho
by Richard Calder
(Earthlight, £6.99, 378 pages, paperback, published 5 June 2002.)
Richard Calder's ninth book, Lord Soho, is a sequel  to
his decadent adventure novel, Malignos. In Malignos, Richard
Pike, with the help of Espiritu Santo, a sword that is really a powerful
being from another dimension, journeyed into the demon-infested bowels
of the Earth in order to rescue his one great love, herself a demon.
In a series of stories originally serialized in the British fiction
magazine Interzone, Lord Soho follows the travails of
the future generations of Richard Pikes, all named after their heroic
ancestor, all descended from the human/demon marriage of the first Richard
Pike and his demon lover, Gala.
Throughout Lord Soho, the petty and self-involved Pikes aspire
to nobility and do everything they can to attain it. They are socially
tainted because of their half-demon ancestry and all live in the shadow
of the original Pike's legendary deeds. They must also come to terms
with their demonic heritage and their symbiotic link to Espiritu Santo.
Calder has a history of favouring unsympathetic protagonists, and Lord
Soho is no exception. Pike's descendants are a whiny, egocentric
lot who have inherited his self-loving vanity, with neither their patriarch's
chutzpah or passion. The original Pike's roguish charm imbued Malignos
with an emotional focus that Lord Soho lacks.
Calder refuses to romanticize or glorify his characters' unpleasantness,
or even to be judgmental towards them. He invents repulsive characters
and presents them with neither love nor contempt. Readers must deal
with their reactions to his creations on their own.
Where Calder is passionate is with the baroque and perverse qualities
he invests into his fantastical settings. Calder's bizarre imagination
and idiosyncratic prose style provide the momentum, perversely seducing
with their fetishistic overindulgences.
Originally published in The Montreal Gazette,
Saturday, 21 September 2002.
Claude Lalumière's Fantastic Fiction
is a series of
capsule reviews first published in the Saturday Books
section of The Montreal Gazette.
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