The God Game by Gerald Suster

This is a highly inventive novel falling squarely within the 'Weird Tales' genre and yet avoiding the pitfalls of derivative writing so common within such stories. The novel commences with Arthur Machen (an actual writer of strange tales whose literary reputation has increased since his death as a consequence of his influence upon HP Lovecraft) in 1899 who inexplicably finds himself drawn into bizarre encounters with real people on the streets of London that are the embodiment of characters that he created for his stories. In contemporary London a century later, Adam Stride, a private detective, admirer of Arthur Machen's works and author of a novel inspired by Machen's most famous novel "The Three Imposters", finds himself in a similar predicament with people that bear an uncanny resemblance to fictional characters created by Arthur Machen or by himself within his homage "The Labyrinth of Satan". For both Machen and Stride, bizarre occurrences become progressively more ominous and threatening after coming into possession of an mysterious amulet of unknown provenance. The amulet has curious properties akin to those of a scrying stone.

What follows (and I'm certainly not going to tell you any more than that) is a first class psychological thriller based upon stories within stories within a twisted tale that Arthur Machen himself would have been proud of. I had no idea what was coming as the plot thickened for both the innocent victims within this chilling novel. The phrase "twist in the tale" is particularly apt in this case.

You do not need to have previously read the works of Arthur Machen to derive a great deal of enjoyment from this book. It's a real page turner and leaves you at the end with as many nagging questions as answers. The recurrent feature of stories within stories continues beyond the final page when you discover that Gerald Suster himself has also subsequently written a novel called "The Labyrinth of Satan". This begs the question as to whether there is a character within this book bearing an uncanny resemblence to Adam Stride, a question to which I have yet to find an answer!

Anybody who professes a passion for weird tales should read this. For me, I'll be hunting out other novels by this innovative author; but first, I'll be reading "The Three Imposters", "The Novel of the White Powder" and other strange tales penned by Arthur Machen. ( )