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| Sixty-One Nails |
Mike Shevdon’s Sixty-One Nails is billed as a Neverwhere for this generation. While I can’t entirely agree with that reviewer’s statement (we are talking about Neil Gaiman and who can match him?), I have to say that this is a very engrossing read. I need to go back to the library and get the next book in the series.
Niall Petersen works in the City of London. There’s nothing out of the ordinary in his life; he’s very unremarkable–just another divorce with ex-wife issues. One morning on the way to work, he suffers a heart attack and dies on the Underground. He is revived by a woman who insists that he’s a doctor and that he doesn’t need an ambulance. This is just the first bit of weirdness in a long series of weird events in Niall’s life. In fact, the heart attack is the last normal thing that happens to him.
After dying, Niall finds out that he’s the latest entrant into a long-standing shadow war between feyre courts. It takes him a long time to be convinced of this, but when something inhuman tries to kill him again that very night, Niall starts to believe. The woman who revived him is his reluctant guide in this new world. Like Neverwhere, Sixty-One Nails is set mostly in the parts of London that most people don’t pay attention to. It also incorporates odd bits of English history (like quit rents) and builds them into the plot. I love books that teach me trivia.
We get to explore this new world and its complicated rules and magic along with Niall. We end up racing all over London and Shropshire as Niall (now called Rabbit) and his mentor Blackbird try to save humanity from very horrible deaths. Even though there is some fairly incredible acts of magic in this book, Shevdon has done a remarkable job of making it all believable and tense. There are a couple of scenes towards the end where you really believe that Niall and Blackbird could lose to the feyre nightmares.
I really started to enjoy this book after I stopped comparing it to Neverwhere. As I said, how can anyone else live up to that level of imagination? If you do pick up this book, ignore the blurbs on the back.