Raymond St. Elmo

"This narrative depicts an endless night-path down which I stumble, slashing and philosophizing." (pg. 172)

While the author himself has become one of my favourite writers, Raymond St. Elmo's Quest of the Five Clans series does not rotate at my natural speed, or along my favoured orbits. It's a mad, disorderly adventure, overdosed with shape-shifters and outlandish personages. But, as with the previous instalment in the series, The Moon Tartan ended up winning me over simply by its quality.

I found it difficult to orient myself at first, and even by the end I had to work to keep my wits about me. St. Elmo uses an odd, stop-start syntax in The Moon Tartan that gives me something akin to motion sickness (his other, non-Clan novels are more flowing). At its worst, it leads to clumsy lines of faux-regal dialogue like "This castle fast bests me" (pg. 120). The content itself – a relentless procession of moon-touched loons dip in and out of the story – makes it hard to identify quite what the story/quest/narrative is meant to even be, and is so random in its fantastical creativity that it's not always clear what the rules of the story are, and what is possible.

But then, perhaps it's my fault for not being able to hold my literary liquor. The Moon Tartan is rich and theatrical, and consistently involving, with the originality and erudition that I'm always seeking out (and so rarely find) in contemporary fiction. Though the book never settles, I – as reader – did manage to, and the main confrontations – such as the ones with the Laird Mac Tier and, later, with Dealer and the Aldermen – are tense, thrilling and great theatre. In such powerful moments (which, it should be said, soon outweigh the book's more challenging features), The Moon Tartan shows itself as intoxicating writing, like a lunatic Zorro. While the series is not, as I said, at my preferred speed or inclination, I would have liked this much less from a writer less capable of delivering it. St. Elmo is a singular writer and I know that, once I have recovered, I will be keen for another round of whatever he's concocting.

"I sighed, drained the wine-cup, reached to place it upon an ancient throne." (pg. 76)… (mehr)

Letters from the Well in the Season of the Ghosts, like much of author Raymond St. Elmo's excellent writing, finds that sweet spot where intelligent literature and literature-as-entertainment meet and harmonise. It combines the peculiarity and lightness of the best of Pratchett and Gaiman with an underlying steely intelligence, and when the latter reveals itself overtly in some unique philosophical moments (such as Tatterpatch's conversation with Maddy on page 313 about the various levels of Hell), it reinforces the sense that this author is one to trust. It's heartening – and inspiring – that there's a self-published author out there creating stories of this quality.

Of the numerous books I've read from St. Elmo so far, Letters from the Well initially seemed the least promising. Its concept was a good one, but less kaleidoscopic than some of his other books: a small town called Hell drops letters addressed to the other Hell down a local well, where they are forgotten about… until one is answered. But despite the appeal and mystery of this, I always have my guard up when the protagonist of a story is a 15-year-old girl. Such stories always threaten to put the 'YA' in 'yawn'.

Happily, Letters from the Well proves anything but, and it's a fun mix of action, adventure, fantasy and humour – with those afore-mentioned rebars of steely intelligence to stop me from feeling too guilty about enjoying a light adventure about teenagers. The characters are appealing, with even the bit-part players granted their depth, and the writing is light and witty. Small-town America is always a charming setting, and when things began to go from Pratchett-weird to eldritch-weird, the novel reminded me a bit of Stranger Things. St. Elmo is too much of an original for that comparison to be anything other than a lazy one, but it's a happy one nonetheless.… (mehr)

"Madness is the ability to believe this world is something else than what we see." (pg. 40)

While The Blood Tartan is a bit too chaotic to harmonise completely with my own tastes, author Raymond St. Elmo shows once again that he is a writer to be trusted. If a reader is willing to adjust to St. Elmo's singular approach to storytelling – his madcap erudition, his contradictory love of straight-laced whimsy and sensible paradox – they will once again be entertained by one of his original, high-quality adventures.

The Blood Tartan, the first book in a series of five, is quite hard to grasp at first. It has a chaotic first 100 pages told from the point of view of its protagonist, the eloquent assassin Rayne Gray, and for a while it is hard to understand what is happening, what the stakes are, or who we should invest in. Once it settles, however, some of the haze begins to clear, and the reader becomes increasingly convinced by this strange tale. Set in a slightly-fantastical Britain at the dawn of the Industrial Revolution (it is never entirely clear where, but I easily imagined it set on the Anglo-Scottish borderlands), we follow Gray on a mission where he encounters a strange and bewildering swordsman who fights him to a standstill. The mission spectacularly compromised, Gray's reputation as a folk hero and political player begins to unravel, but he draws the attention of the 'Clans'.

This is where the reader's patience is required, as who the 'Clans' are takes a while to form. Their members are highly potent, arguably magical, human beings who have ascended to a higher form of perception – "others only play at what we master" (pg. 151). They are dangerous, skilled, and completely mad. With this established, Rayne Gray is drawn into their world; into swordfights, intrigues, romances and other off-kilter depictions of classic adventure-romance tropes. It is as though Sir Walter Scott had re-written Alice in Wonderland, or Lewis Carroll Ivanhoe. It is also something of a fantasy-novel fever-dream; Alice's tea party hosted in a guildhall.

This sounds excellent, and it often is. The book is extremely well-written; Rayne's first-person narrative is charming and never flags, and occasionally there's something that shows starkly the rewards the reader receives for making the effort to adjust to St. Elmo's style. This can be a scene (riding on horses through the night (pg. 197)), a setting (the 'secret valley' of the Blade Tartan (pp152-3)), or a line ("Respect is simple enough. We leave each other to hear what music we can in the noise of life" (pg. 164)). At no point is the reader bored, and our occasional confusion is pleasant, like a light drunkenness.

Sometimes the novel appears too frivolous to become something truly loved rather than merely admired, and the chaos occasionally threatens to become churn (though it never reaches that critical point). I never learned why certain things happened as they did, why Rayne Gray happily embraces the madness, or why 'Gray' has rivals named 'Green' and 'Black'. A theme regarding the incipient industrialisation of the country (and presumably, the loss of the 'magic' that our mad hatters represent?) never fully blossoms, and The Blood Tartan remains an errant escapade when it had the potential to become something more. It may yet prove to be so after I pursue The Moon Tartan, the second volume in this story, down a dark alleyway. Even if it does not, it will at least be entertaining. St. Elmo has earned such trust and such goodwill; he may be self-published and rather unknown, but he's the most interesting writer I've come across in a good while.… (mehr)

Another fine piece of writing from Raymond St. Elmo. It is quite remarkable – and damning for the industry – that books of this quality are self-published rather than backed by an imprint, but this peculiar injustice only heightens the sweetness, the thrill of discovering a special treasure, that accompanies the reader when they open Letters from a Shipwreck.

It's hard to summarise what's great about the book, or even what the book is, without resorting to inflated generalities. The ideas contained in its pages are so rich and varied that to sum up the story as a shipwrecked sailor on a strange island pining for his beloved does no justice to it; it doesn't cover the invention and creativity, the erudition, the strange loops and diversions of the sailor's path, or the ambiguity of his voyage. To describe what's great about the book and to mention the literary quality and originality of its writing, the author's skill in seamlessly delivering a non-linear narrative, or the creative approaches to the book's characters and themes, is to say something so broad that it seems almost to say nothing at all. But to go into greater detail on these points would be to spike the reader's own sense of discovery.

And read it they should. The flaws are few, and exist due to the book's vaulting ambition rather than anything being found wanting in the author. It can be easy to get lost in the book's fantastical second-half, which doesn't quite satisfy the tantalising mysteries which were set up in the book's first half. I found myself wishing more had been done to explain the importance of the 'Libris Acherontia', the lost manuscript which is relegated to the role of MacGuffin when it could have been the Rosetta Stone of the story. The essential redundance of the story has literary merit – to "wash [a man] onto an island of lunatics, chase him into a labyrinth then kill him to no purpose at all" (pg. 329) seems much like life – but can feel less ingenious than it is. (Note: This quotation from the novel isn't a spoiler and doesn't refer to the protagonist.)

But it's always easier to be critical of good writing than of bad, for the same reason that it's easier to see imperfections reflected in a gemstone than in a pile of mud. Raymond St. Elmo deserves a lot of praise for delivering a complex story with such readable simplicity, an outlandish and humorous story with moments of real literary artistry ("He glanced at the stars and then back to the flames, as though ensuring that the first burned in proper time to the second" (pg. 187)). And even though the Libris Acherontia manuscript isn't dominant in the story, this itch can be scratched by reading another of St. Elmo's excellent novels, The Origin of Birds in the Footprints of Writing, whose bird-track manuscript is referenced a few times in Shipwreck (pp12, 385). As a curious writer once said to me, the only fuel for the self-published is the hope that there is something of worth in what they write, and that it will be found. Letters from a Shipwreck in the Sea of Suns and Moons is certainly of worth, and every reader should seek to find it.… (mehr)