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"Reading this book - and it is a page-turner - you become immersed, befogged, as if you had been looking at one of the glass books... a rollicking ride, as stupendous as it is stupefying" Guardian
Purchase your beautiful hardback edition of the marvellous adventure - and if you're one of the first, you'll enjoy the unique limited edition glassy blue jackets of The Glass Books of the Dream Eaters.
What the media and websites are saying:
'A novel of desire, sensation and desperate jeopardy . . . a world of thrilling perversity and brutal fbs metatrader violence . . . exciting and intriguing, each episode churns with adrenaline and leaves us suspended over a gulf of anxiety for the characters fates' ***** Time Out
'Bodice-ripping' Elle
'Wilkie Collins on acid' New Statesman
'A page-turner - you become immersed. As stupendous as it is stupefying . . . a rollicking ride' Guardian
'Web serial novel with a Dickens of a plot.’ Evening Standard
‘This first instalment of ten takes us at full lick into a novel of desire, sensation and desperate jeopardy … from a starting point of prudish respectability Celeste’s adventures take her through the crust into a world of thrilling perversity and brutal violence … genuinely exciting and intriguing. Each episode churns with adrenaline and leaves us suspended over a gulf of anxiety for the characters’ fates; if the serial is to return, this is the book to do it.’ Time Out
‘Think of The Adventures of Sherlock Holmes: its lurid plots, its murky pea-soupers. Now, apply the production values of Buffy the Vampire Slayer, commission a re-write by the Marquis de Sade – oh, and lose Sherlock and replace him with Barbarella … it’s literally a ripping yarn.’ thelondonpaper
‘Reminiscent of a Harry Potter for grown ups, tingling, fascinating, exciting and impossible to put down.’ Inthenews.co.uk
‘The physical objects are so lovely, so nicely designed … it’s awfully swell to print a set as handsome as these.’ Cory Doctorow, Boing Boing
‘Magnificent … compelling … seductively tense.’ AV. Club
‘Cruelly but wonderfully leaving you on tenterhooks at the end of each chapter you’ll be pacing the floorboards as you wait for the next instalment.’ Marmaladya.com
‘i just finished the first installment of 10 it's lots of fun already, and really nice to read a book in a weekly installment like that. The origins of tv serials i suppose. Very exciting and...in some way the cliffhangers make you really impatient to get stuck in to the next book this friday.’ JeremyGetsCash & Jeremy Mac Lynn, www.jeremygetscash.com
‘I was very excited to find the first chapter of The Glass Books Of The Dream Eaters on my doormat this morning … the installment looks great. The design and attention to detail feel perfectly matched to the content, and I'm sure the quality of the overall execution will make the series highly collectible. Waiting for next week's chapter is almost like waiting for the next episode of Lost. Sweet agony.’ The Suspension Bridge
‘It’s really brilliant!’ Lauren Cerand
‘Just received my set – they are great. Pride of place on my new book shelves.’ Nick Stringer, Channel 4
What the bloggers are saying:
‘Making Mondays bearable for the next nine weeks’ Suchahit
Readers on The Book Bar blog:
‘mine has just arrived too and it all looks most exciting’
‘And now I've read it and I'm intrigued more than in a state of suspense and slightly afeared for what may be fbs demo account coming next in terms of content.’
‘Exciting beginning, don't you think? Love all the costume detail of the masked ball, and Miss Temple's rather prissy ways thrown into disarray by the heady air of eroticism and mystery... And I think it's a perfect length as well, I read it in two sittings, but you could easily do it in one. So, a great start, and I'm really looking forward to this developing over the coming weeks.’
Readers on dovegreyreader:
‘What fun! I'd love to subscribe to the periodical numbers of a thrilling novel as did the readers of the 19th century.’
‘Wow, that looks/sounds great!’
‘We were rather excited yesterday when this first instalment of The Glass Book of the Dream Eaters dropped onto our doormat…We love the idea of going so retro for a new book, especially in an age of e-paper, blogs and podcasts. There's a lot to be said for that sense of anticipation, waiting for the next instalment to arrive. The format is just over A5, with the cover printed onto an uncoated stock, and made to look a bit grubby…check out the elegant and ethereal’ We Made This
‘The serialised novel was an art the Victorians perfected, so the installments idea fits the 'Glass Books' really well - it's a gothicky/adventure set in a version of Victorian London that brings to mind William Gibson's/Bruce Sterling's The Difference Engine. Physically, the first installment is a lovely product. The art-work is excellent, with the book boasting a cover that's a perfect pastiche of that over-wrought, full-of-type Victorian news-stand style. The insides I'm enjoying, too…I raced through instalment one and was even dawdling on the tube platform on the way to work just to cram in a few more pages…roll on next week's installment...’ Treacle Down
‘I don’t get much in the post that I look forward to, but I couldn’t wait for this to arrive. The first installment dropped onto the doormat a few days ago, and although my dog nibbled the corner a little, I’ve been enjoying it ever since. Every Tuesday for the next 9 weeks, I’ll be waiting by the front door for the next installment. Huzzah!’ LordElph’s Ramblings
‘Simply wonderful. With their slim format, lilacy-blue colour and plethora of fonts they look gorgeous; they feel good too; and they smell... well, they smell of printed paper. I was hoping for parma violets or antique rose or something suitably evocative, but the fact that I sniffed them at all just shows how sensorially delighted I am! It looks like they're being playful with the author's biography too. Is he an ex-army doctor and playwright (of which there appears to be some corroborating evidence)? Is he a discredited historian? Could he possibly be both? I haven't read a page and I'm already hooked to find out what's next...’ Comfortable Disorientation
‘I did order up Glass Books Of The Dream Eaters and two chapters have so far arrived. And I am rather enjoying it. It is very cod Victorian and at present distinctly seedy. It is also rather intriguing as at present it seems to be simply a mess of weird conspiracies and I have no idea where they are going. It must be said that receiving it one chapter a week does stretch out the reading and so make me ponder it more. Normally I just inhale books. A painful experience if taken too literally. So it is nice to be forced to take my time over this one and actually think about what I am reading.’
Munchkinstein
‘Man, I’m psyched about reading the first installment of The Glass Books. Arrived this morning. It’s great to see a book turned into an event, especially when they take care over the design like this. It looks good and feels good, just as books are meant to be. Review coming soon - chapter 2 is due next week so I’d better get reading!’ Alan Bradburne
‘A cracking read so far, with the fact that each new installment arrives through the post rather than one being able to read the whole thing at once adding to the suspense and the sense of occasion. A bold yet somewhat provincial heroine, an brutal yet sympathetic anti-hero, secret decadence at masked balls, a mysterious and threatening device draining or perhaps redefining the will… I am most certainly looking forward to further episodes.’ Ordinal Malaprop
Miss Temple looked down from the veranda of the Shipping House, an untouched glass of lemon squash on the table and the Shipping Master himself, Mr. Pauncelote – a Frenchman – hovering uncared-for behind her left shoulder. Below at its pier lay the Gloriana, a three-masted sloop that would carry her away on the evening’s tide. The day was very hot – without thought for the man behind her Miss Temple dabbed the tip of her tongue onto her upper lip and tasted the salt. The coach ride from the estate had taken its dusty hour, and once her trunks were set down – trunks she could see even then disappearing into the sloop’s trim hold – she sent the servants (for none had come with her save servants, her father occupied for yet another day on the far side of the island) with the coach back to the house and retreated (or, more accurately, invaded) the Shipping House as a place to pass her time. While she in no way wanted the company of Mr. Pauncelote – though, given the respect due her father, there was no way the man could avoid attending upon her every minute – she knew that if she had instead gone to Flanagan’s hotel or Mrs. Hobart’s Tea Room, she must pass company with those people waiting to waylay her – young men from other estates, the widowed banker, even horrid Doctor Sugarman, who persisted in the face of her outright contempt – all of whom she had seen from the window of her coach, clustered casually by their own windows, waiting for her passing as if she were some minor queen, determined to press their desperate suit one final time.
“A fine craft, Miss,” observed the Shipping Master after clearing his throat for the third time in as many minutes without any response from Miss Temple. “I have seen to the comfort of your cabin myself, and spoken to the Captain about every particular.”
Miss Temple gave the man a polite enough smile, squinting her eyes to turn her face up toward the bright sun. She looked back at the sloop. Her trunks were gone below, and the sailors – squat, barefoot men who moved amongst the dangling ropes and tackles with such ease that Miss Temple could not but think of the monkeys that played about her own fruit trees – were not occupied with bales of copra and barrels of rum.
She wondered if this would be her final island sunset, and if the cold city winter would bite her to the bone as she feared. She wondered if she could in any way rely on her aged Aunt Agathe, whom she had never met and whose handwriting was dismayingly riddled with loops and frills. She wondered if she would ever find a husband, and what sort of man he might be, from so cold a place – deciding at once that such a man could know nothing of her own origins, of how such a place became a forge. Miss Temple sighed and reached for her lemon squash. Who knew when fresh lemons would next be at hand? It was an appalling thought. Miss Temple drank off the contents in two long indelicate swallows with a break between them for breath, and set out the empty glass for more.
Cardinal Chang instructed the coachman to stop on the near side of Worthing Circle, for he did not especially care to be seen climbing out. The sun was down perhaps an hour, but that meant the denizens of Worthing Circle he had in mind to visit would just now be stirring and alert. Chang waited in an unlit, shuttered shop-front for the coach to pull away into the fog, rolling his left shoulder – still stiff from the night before. He had gathered a man from a rooming house on the waterfront and delivered him trussed like a kicking hog for slaughter to an isolated country estate. The business was not his: a seducer in hiding, the pregnant girl’s father with the wherewithal to take action. The man’s one blow with a fire poker – partially deflected by the haft of Chang’s stick – had left a two-inch bruise on his bicep, now the color of a jaundiced plum. The task itself was hardly unusual, yet as he began to walk, his stick swinging loosely at his side, Chang felt again the growing presentiment that something in his world had changed, or was about to. It was not his arm – violence was his trade and injury an unremarkable accompaniment – as long as he was never the one tied up on the carpet, it mattered little.
What bothered Cardinal Chang was something else, a nagging sense of being seen – by whom he did not know, or, still more, if not by whom, by what. As a man of reason and logic, such vague and childish foreboding was welcome as a sore tooth at breakfast. There was money in his pocket. Li Wu’s waited down a dark stairway but two streets away. Chang smiled grimly and strode forward, for the sake of suspicion approaching the opium den from the narrow end of the alley. This meant climbing one wooden fence, but if he gave that much effort to his fears, he could embrace oblivion with his conscience quelled … yet at the fence Chang went still. From the other side came whispered voices he knew … men like himself, if less refined in their habit and more dependent on brute force.
“He will not come,” hissed the first, a cashiered infantry officer named Sapp.
“He always does after a long job,” a deeper voice rasped in reply, a vicious bear of a man named Horace. “You said so.”
“Evidently I was wrong.”
“But he has habits,” insisted Horace, clearly echoing Sapp’s own logic.
“And even an idiot can change them – apparently,” snapped ex-Lieutenant. Sapp. “We can try his rooming house, and catch the blind beggar there …”
The footsteps faded to silence and Chang sank to his knees with a sigh. Even in the darkness they had begun to ache – it had been too long without sleep. Chang regularly mocked Horace with Latin epigrams when they passed in the street. The single time the man had lost his temper Cardinal Chang had relieved him of a finger on his left hand – an event that, as he had intended, made an impression on anyone else interested in calling Chang to account for any real or perceived grievance … or so he had assumed. He slipped his thumb and forefinger under his smoked glasses and rubbed his eyes – resenting the impulse that had prevented his ambush as he resented good advice in general. Chang quietly walked in the opposite direction. It would consume his money faster, but he could disappear into a brothel just as well.
It was not often Doctor Svenson drank champagne, and he wished the occasion was one he could enjoy. He selected a crystal flute from a silver tray and wove his way unnoticed through smiling officers whose shoulders dripped with gold and officials whose starched collars might have sliced hard cheese. At the far end of the room, near the musicians dutifully spinning a tepid waltz, stood the Archduke of Macklenburg in close conversation with his esteemed guest, the foreign financier, Robert Vandaariff, recently ennobled and in Macklenburg as part of a tour of several northern principalities. The court sang with talk of investment and speculation, in everything from fish oil to timber to mineral rights. As the Archduke’s interests were normally limited to eating and shooting, the Doctor had some sympathy for Lord Vandaariff, no doubt even then enduring a typically droll narrative on the successful slaughter of grouse.
Svenson stopped when he noticed Baron von Hoern across the room, who upon catching the Doctor’s eye casually turned his own gaze to a curtained alcove to the far side of the musicians. Svenson yawned, covering his mouth, and then made a point of apologizing to a Colonel Glaube and his wife, who had not been paying attention in any case, and ambled toward the curtain, reaching into the inner pocket of his tunic for his silver cigarette case. He set his champagne glass onto a table, took a cigarette from the case and lit it on the table’s candelabra, then slipped the case back in his pocket, exhaled the smoke into the candles, blowing just hard enough so the flames flickered but did not go out, and picked up his champagne again. No one was paying him the slightest interest. He ambled up to the curtain and quietly vanished behind it.
He stood at the entrance to one of the older receiving rooms, readied for use after the music, when the curtain would be drawn and the trays of sweetmeats laid out on the table. The mighty stone hearth held a roaring fire, but this was the only source of light in the room, and at first Svenson was sure the room was quite empty. Then, from the shadows on the far side of the hearth came a low chuckle. Svenson’s heart sank. The heir to the throne of Macklenburg, Prince Karl-Horst, had nipped into this very room for yet another assignation with one of the servants, or still worse the credulous wife of some hapless soldier. The brightness of the hearth hid from his eye how far the assignation had proceeded. Karl-Horst chuckled again – the smugness of the young man’s laugh especially loathsome – and in reply Svenson heard a female whisper. How soon would the curtain be flung wide? It could be at the end of this very dance. With some deliberancy he kicked his foot into a side chair so the thin legs scraped loudly across the floor. He muttered an oath and stumbled – too many drinks! – toward the hearth, never looking at the pair in their corner but with each step drawing nearer.
“I say, it’s the Doctor,” called the Prince, stepping in the light while smoothing down the front of his uniform.
“My goodness!” cried Svenson. “Your highness – I did not see you!”
The Prince looked to the curtained doorway, his left hand plucking unpleasantly at the front of his trousers.
“Is it, ah, time for the reception?”
“Just so, your highness.”
“Excellent. I shall be right along. Perhaps you could tell the Baron or my father.”
“Of course, your highness.”
Svenson clicked his heels and walked from the room with more speed than he had entered, wishing very much he had not just seen the woman behind the Prince’s shoulder. Tall and slim, her lovely blonde hair just a little undone and the paint from her lips marking his … Miss Lydia Vandaariff, their guest’s sole and – who knew, but for the Doctor’s swift entry – virginal daughter.
The Contessa di Lacquer-Sforza leaned toward the thickly painted canvas and smiled, appreciating both the mockery of the subject matter – the martyrdom of St. Veronika at the hands of barbarians – and the skill of execution, so that even she felt a shiver of delight at the truly wicked ecstasy lighting up the victim’s face. She glanced at the three women behind her, clustered somewhat obediently before the particularly bracing St. Rowena and the Viking Raiders and smiled with a delight deeper than she had received from the lurid artwork. She called to them.
“Mr. Veilandt’s skill with a brush is transporting, do you not agree?”
They turned as one, all nodding their agreement, and the Contessa smiled again as she read their reactions: the serious young widow, Mrs. Stearne, with her large sad eyes, the breathless Elspeth Poole, daughter to a well-off merchant, and then fluttering between them like a golden lily at the very instant of unfurling, the innocent heiress, Lydia Vandaariff.
“I should not know what to say!” giggled Miss Poole. The Contessa was pleased that Mrs. Stearne – also with nothing today, despite the flush of her cheeks – actually remained silent. Lydia nodded vigorously.
“My father intends to buy them,” she said, whispering.
“His taste is excellent,” whispered the Contessa in return. “And as the artist has mysteriously passed on, their value can only increase – the rule of scarcity, you know.”
Lydia nodded again and the Contessa took the moment to continue on to the next painting, smaller than the rest, a fragment cut from a much larger canvas, a version of the Annunciation. The Contessa sighed, for the face of the haloed girl – again, her eyes shut in rapture – brought to mind her own bargains and self-determined rules, the most primary being the banishment of all regret from her own interior palace. She told herself this was mere pragmatism, and she believed it – for she entertained self-inquiry as often as a crocodile entertains guests – but even the most determined intelligence finds itself at times facing a death’s head in a mirror. It was always better to keep things simple. She turned and caught Caroline Stearne’s eye. The woman stepped across to the Contessa and the Contessa, smiling as if in possession of an especially cunning secret, whispered in the woman’s ear.
“It is best that we keep Lydia from this particular canvas. It can only distress her – and there is time enough for that when it comes.”
The Comte d’Orkancz took a moment to breathe in the bouquet of the port before taking a sip, nodding with simple, frank satisfaction – the ’39 Harker-Bornarth was not the ’37, but he was, after all, in a brothel – at the woman across the table, Madame Madelaine Kraft, whose brothel it was.
“You have employed my hellebore mixture?” he asked her.
“I have,” she replied, watching him closely. “It is like no mixture I have employed before.”
“And yet your young woman – she is well?”
“Perfectly so.”
“And relieved of her … charge?”
“Indeed.”
The Comte permitted himself a smile, the merest curl of his lips, and took another sip of port. It was obvious that Madame Kraft was quite accustomed to being the smartest person of her own acquaintance.
“It was of course my pleasure to assist you. One hates to hear of such waste – such needless waste – when a simple knowledge of herbs is all one needs.”
“I should not call it simple,” said Madame Kraft. She wore earrings made of a single raw pearl the size of a songbird’s egg set in silver, complimenting her bronzed skin and her blue silk dress most favorably. The Comte wondered as to the exact blend of the woman’s racial extraction, an idle puzzle akin to the provenance of an indigo tulip.
For a moment they did not speak. The Comte d’Orkancz finished his port and set the glass back on the table.
“And the woman I requested?” he asked. “You have selected someone?”
“I have,” replied Madame Kraft, who clearly did not trust his intentions in the slightest but, especially after the gift of his mixture could hardly refuse him. The Comte’s lip curled again.
“The daughter of a ruined mill owner,” she continued. “Skillful, experienced, and compliant as you like – yet also proud, ambitious, restless, and, since you asked, perfectly bitter to have found herself in my employ.”
“And beautiful?”
“Of course she is beautiful,” she replied, as if the question was both obvious and disappointing.
“And what is the pretty girl’s name?”
“Margaret. Margaret Hooke.”
The Comte nodded, as if this, too, he had foreknown. Madame Kraft stood and gestured to the room, which held armchairs and a small settee, but no sort of bed.
“And this will do?”
“It will indeed,” replied the Comte. “As I said, my point of interest is to ask her questions.”
Madame Kraft smiled herself, as if she had seen through him at last. “Every whore is used to men who only want to talk … at first.”
“I assure you Madame,” he answered, “it is no talk either you or Miss Hooke has ever, ever encountered before.”
Francis Xonck nipped the tip of a black tight wrapped cheroot with his teeth and spat the bit of tobacco into the tall, slick grass that lined the road to Tarr Manor. He cupped his hands around a match and puffed three times, the smoke building in his mouth until the cheroot had caught. He shook out the match and exhaled, dropped the match onto the road and stuck the cheroot into his mouth. With both hands Xonck brushed his coat – a luxurious marigold colored wool – and his black trousers, and then pulled his watch from his waistcoat. The coach was late, but he did not especially care. With any luck that meant things had gone well with the horrible old man, though he did not especially care about that either. He had seen the quarry with his own eyes and filled five of the Comte’s damnable glass jars with scrapings from different spots in the seam of clay. The glass jars, wrapped in cotton wool, jostled in Xonck’s pocket as he replaced the watch. He took the cheroot in his hand again, exhaled and tapped off the ash. The coach was in sight now, clearing the windbreak of poplar trees. He frowned at the red dirt smeared onto his black boot-heels and took a conscientious moment to scrape them clean.
He waved the coachman to keep his seat, opened the door and swung himself up with a spry leap, closed the door and knocked on the roof. The coachman drove on and Xonck happily stretched his legs, having the seat to himself. He grinned at the two black-coated men sitting opposite and inhaled on his cheroot.
“Is the Uncle any more compliant?”
“He is not,” replied the older and better dressed of the two, Deputy Minister Harald Crabbé, a small, precise man whose cheeks were pink and closely shaved.
Francis Xonck laughed.
“Ah well – it was a poor hope to begin with.” He turned to the empty, grassy landscape outside the window, blowing smoke. “Of course, with such a wilderness surrounding such an isolated house, I do tremble for Lord Tarr’s safety.”
Crabbé did not comment, but Xonck did not care – Crabbé was a cold fish and free speaking pricked his composure, that was perfectly fine. It was not as if the Deputy Minister would be making a return journey some imminent midnight. Xonck turned his attention to the other man, Crabbé’s compliant assistant and – happily enough for their enterprise – Tarr’s nephew. He reached into his pocket and pulled out one of the cork-stopped jars, a thin glass tube perhaps the size of a large man’s thumb.
“Have you seen it, then, Mr. Bascombe?” Xonck asked. “This precious indigo clay?”
“I have not, sir.”
Bascombe, whose frame was fine enough but bore himself in an altogether too cautious a manner for Xonck’s patience, glanced exasperatingly at Crabbé first for approval before reaching out to take the specimen jar for himself, holding it to the window to study.
“It … well … it looks rather like a crumbling sort of … reddish … clay …”
“Well described!” chuckled Xonck. “It is entirely dull! But then, you know, so are most school girls, at least to look at them.”
Crabbé cleared his throat and relieved his assistant of the glass jar, glancing at it once with a sniff before passing it back to Xonck.
“We have spoken about all of this, Roger,” the Deputy Minister said. “It is strictly your decision.”
“Strictly,” echoed Xonck with a sneer.
It was, he knew very well, no such thing – Bascombe’s path had been gently angled these past weeks by more hands than the young man could imagine. But beyond this, even had the young man truly controlled his own destiny, Xonck had no doubt, from his own experience as a third child whose older brother had inherited all, that Bascombe would not hesitate. The fellow might be shy, but he was not an idiot. Xonck tapped the ash onto the floor of the coach and sneered again. The idiots would learn soon enough.
THE GLASS BOOKS OF THE DREAM EATERS is an utterly compulsive gothic adventure story, set in a fictitious Victorian city, and featuring a host of wicked and outlandish characters, including Miss Celestial Temple, a feisty heiress; Cardinal Chang, a deadly assassin and Dr Svenson, guardian to a louche and syphilitic prince.
When Miss Temple recently arrived in the city from distant shores suddenly finds her engagement broken off without suitable explanation by her fianc Roger Bascombe, she is given a choice: turn away from polite society or turn adventuress and discover the reason for her rejection.
Deciding to secretly follow her former lover, Miss Temple finds herself a trespasser at a masked ball. There, strange and unspeakable acts involving electricity and books of blue glass (not to mention a murder) take place and Miss Temple almost loses both her virtue and her life.
Horrified that the man to whom she was betrothed could be mixed up in such diabolical affairs, Miss Temple is determined to get to the bottom of this mystery. She is joined in this endeavour by a foreign surgeon and a disfigured assassin known as Cardinal Chang both with their own reasons to make trouble for those in league with Roger Bascombe.
Together, Miss Temple and her accomplices unearth a dastardly plot to take over the world. They discover corruption, murder, bribery and blackmail at the highest levels, and thwart the plans of a beautiful but deadly Contessa. And at the heart of an adventure encompassing airship flights, rooftop battles, carriage abductions and murder most foul are the sinister glass books of the title books offering up visions of fantasy and horror that engulf the readers mind.
We intend to celebrate publication of the hardback in January with a lavish masked ball. We hope that G W Dahlquist will attend, but strangely, he has not been seen for some time...
For further information, please contact Amelia Fairney, Viking Publicity Director on
0207 010 3247 / amelia.fairney@uk.penguingroup.com