Review: Bride of the Rat God!

HAMBLY, Barbara, Bride of the Rat God, Raven Books/Robinson Publishing Ltd., London, 1995.

Octavo; paperback, with illustrated embossed wrappers with gilt titling; 336pp. Remaindered; some mild scuffing to the title and cover edges; a pen mark on the rear wrapper. Else, very good

Amazing, the things you find in the bargain bins of second-hand bookshops. This beauty was inevitable; an absolute lock for my personal interests and peccadilloes: a 1920s occult thriller set in the Golden Age of Hollywood featuring cult strangeness stemming from China. Is that perfect or what?

The plot is a ripper: sultry actress Chrysande Flamande appears in a movie in which she dies in the closing scene; she wears an opal necklace which, being a collector of Chinese objets d’art, derives from her personal collection. This trinket, according to the cultist madmen waiting in the wings, marks out the wearer as the chosen sacrifice, or “bride”, of an ancient Manchurian rat devil-god. With the release of her latest film, “Kiss of Darkness”, it’s undeniable to any frothing madman out there in the world that she now has an imminent date with a stone table and a long knife.

But Chrysande (or “Christine” to give her actual name) with her floor-length furs and egret-feather bandeaux is hardly fit for battle with ancient deities and their hideous minions: that task falls to Norah, her English sister-in-law, the widowed wife of her brother, killed in World War One, and Norah’s tentative flame Alec Mindelbaum, cinematographer and cynical witness of the excesses of “Hollywoodland”. There are mysterious deaths, wild parties replete with illegal hooch and cocaine, weaselly movie executives putting out potentially scandalous fires and threateningly waving other people’s contracts about; there are wise Chinese fellows skulking in the wings to offer I Ching assistance, Latino servants trying to be invisible in extravagant mansions, studio musicians and chorus girls slumming their way through the seamier side of L.A., and shadowy bootleggers in abundance. What’s not to like?

Well there are a few things. In these sorts of exercises, there is a tendency to try and incorporate as many ‘colour moments’ as possible to make it seem real. We have references to Douglas Fairbanks, Mary Pickford and Charlie Chaplin before page 10; there’s a passing nod to Graumann’s Chinese Theatre and the fact that it was actually one of several such thematic establishments, rather than the standalone oddity of architecture that it is today; and studio names and those of their owners rain from the sky. In the name-dropping stakes surely less is more? And look at this:

“He [Alec] advanced the spark lever [of his Model T Ford], got out again and walked around to the front of the car...He put his shoulder to the radiator, grasped the crank in one hand and the choke wire in the other, and turned the engine twice, then released the choke wire and, gritting his teeth, spun the crank with all his strength...After three or four spins the engine exploded into life with a roar and he bolted around to leap back into the seat and advance the spark.”

While this is interesting for the modern reader, surely a contemporaneous narrator wouldn’t go into this much detail? Surely, they would simply state that “Alec started the car”? Unless this level of detail has some point within the story, then it’s extraneous and could be cited as an instance of the author showing-off. Except that, in this book, Barbara Hambly is so obviously having such a good time that it’s hard to find fault with her eagerness to share the fruits of her research!

I do wish though, that her research - which is excellent regarding Los Angeles and the Hollywood whirl of the Twenties - had extended as far as the backgrounds of her Trans-Atlantic characters. At one point Norah states that her family were left destitute when their London holdings were destroyed in the War: The Blitz, wherein huge areas of London were destroyed by German bombing raids, happened in World War Two, not in the Great War, so this is a major slip and jarring for a reader trying to immerse themselves in the fantasy.

It’s fairly obvious too that Ms. Hambly has, or has had a lot to do with, Pekingese dogs. There are three of them – Chrysande’s playthings and part of her Chinoiserie fetish – and they are intensely referenced in every scene in which they take part, sometimes given much more loving attention than the human characters. However, again, they provide so much fun in the narrative that it’s hard to stay mad at them, although one of them “Black Jasmine” is missing an eye, and the author is slipshod about keeping track of this fact.

Lapses aside, and the occasional tangential diversion into the minutiae of life in 1920s Hollywood, this is a rollicking fun-ride into pulpy fictional excess, and one that, despite the odd hiccup, never fails to keep sight of the fact that this is all supposed to be good fun.

Three-and-a-half tentacled horrors.