If you’re looking for a creepy book to welcome fall, David Macinnis Gill’s Uncanny might not be the best choice, but it does have an interesting premise.
Uncanny has Boston and witches, which is a slight cliché (especially when Salem is about 25 miles away from Boston), but when the witch is an old evil with the nickname of “the Shadowless,” that’s the kind of draw that got yours truly to take a look at this one, sent to me by Greenwillow Books.
But 500-plus pages means that there has to be a good hook. Undead teenagers, definitely undead magical abominations, and a teenager with a special destiny don’t necessarily cut it. Instead, the first half of the book is fairly confusing, with Gill jumping between the perspective of Willow Jane and several other characters, who get the third person while she enjoys first person.
Things start to make sense halfway in, thankfully enough, and by then it was a bit like a downhill ride, speeding along towards the inevitable confrontation and managing to inject some tension in there. The last half of the book does have some legitimately creepy moments, so it gets those props. That’s opposed to the first half of the book, where the moments that you know are supposed to be scary instead come off as repeated singsongs.
Part of the problem here is that the book feels like Gill listed out a few phrases to make sure we knew these were teenagers (from Boston, no less. Yes, wicked shows up … a lot). The idea here is that this book is supposed to be spooky, too, so there are plenty of creepy statements. Gill then took both of these lists, then sprinkled the items on the list liberally throughout the book. When this kind of thing is noticeable in a book that is, again, over 500 pages, it means they’ve been used a lot.
However, Willow Jane is not a bad main character. She’s beset with a pile of problems, but she does her best to work her way through them and even experiments with her power like a teenager who doesn’t necessarily know any better does. That last bit is a nice touch. Her family’s story is quite compelling, too, and it becomes more compelling when you meet Harken, who is a bit like the Thackery Binx of this story except not a cat and not a completely heroic character, but it makes sense in context, we swear. The two of them pair pretty well together, and the story really is as much Harken’s as it is Willow Jane’s.
But Gill at least resists the urge to mash their faces together much. That’s a positive in a book that’s already quite long. I know I keep harping on the book’s length — but here, when things feel so uneven at points, that sort of thing matters.
The concept of being uncanny, as in the uncanny valley, is the idea that something is just a little bit off. Perhaps you can’t completely put your finger on it, but it’s there all the same. It doesn’t seem as though Gill was actually aiming for that — his Uncanny is, spoilers, a person — but his work ends up there.
Next: Reviewing Apex by Mercedes Lackey
The feeling of being unsettled doesn’t come from the actual events within the book, but it does come from the issues with the book. There are some things to like here, but there are things to dislike, too.