Invocation
By Jo L. Walton
Published 2012/2013
ISBN 978-1-4811052-9-3
£11.99, 593 pp.
Complete set (Books I-VI)
Buy INVOCATION via Lulu
"Three months before her eighteenth birthday, in a city shrouded in snow, it's not just Myfanwy Morris's memory which may be about to betray her . . . Myfanwy and her bff Kitty find themselves sucked into the affairs of a mystical secret agency, Chancelhouse, as it tries to reinvent itself for the 21st century. Before long they have encountered Chancelhouse's arch-rivals, Veil . . ."
Here we have 600 pages of 37-point type full of super-power muses who by the power of touch can teach your muscles the kind of memory required to leap into a firefight with the agility of a mountain lion, or think with the criminal impatience of immanent tidal data, or expertly operate any recorded species of limb-mounted artillery, from Aztec hard-floor gun to etheric flamethrower fired naked and rabid at midnight on an Edinburgh playground. That city still bears the scars of this hilarious work of crime fiction, and I have never read more stunning descriptions of a community's astral planes. But why would you let anyone talk about astral planes unless their name was Jo (L.) Walton? Even our author's real name is detournement. Buy it or live forever.
Colin Herd (3am Magazine): ". . . a hyperreal comic thriller and, I’m pretty sure, one of the most urgent, smart and exciting fictional projects of the moment . . ."
Alison Croggon, on Books I-III: “If JG Ballard had written an Enid Blyton girl’s own adventure on Facebook under the influence of mind-altering drugs, he might have ended up with something like Invocation. Or maybe not. Jo L Walton’s hallucinatory anti-fantasy fantasy is a kind of Harry Potter for the Contemporary Poet, a neurological black comedy, a Clockwork Orange for the 21st century, a satire in which contemporary Britain dissolves in the acids of the hyperreal, a paranoid critique, a nonsense that constantly threatens an ambush by alarming lucidity. Being like everything, it’s not like anything else. ‘Anything that is unlike anything else is sad,’ says one of Walton’s uncharacters. Maybe. But in this case, it’s also perilously funny. Did I say it was gloriously written? Perhaps that’s how Walton gets away with it. I’m awaiting the final instalment with pleasurable trepidation.”
*
Kindle Edition
Published 2012/2013
ISBN 978-0-9791411-5-7
£2.15, Complete set (Books I-VI)
Buy INVOCATION via Kindle
You are discreetly invited to update your Kindle version whenever necessary.
*
Read an interview with Jo L. Walton here.
