The Corpse-Rat King, by Lee Battersby

[stephbg]

(Usual review disclaimer i.e. it’s not a review per se just my personal impressions. Yes, there is a difference.)

The Corpse-Rat King is the debut novel of local Perth writer Lee Battersby, and it is tremendous.

I’ve been a fan of Lee’s short story work for many years, and I confess when I saw The Corpse-Rat King on the shelves I assumed it was an anthology. But even on the basis that it was likely I’d already read many of the stories in this theoretical anthology, I was quite happy to purchase it anyway, just to have another batch of Battersby words to hand. To discover it was a novel was a pleasant surprise, and as a first novel, Lee has made the leap to the longer form with aplomb.

I’ll not summarise the plot here, because this isn’t a review, but suffice to say it involves a lot of dead people. Once the dead people were combined with a sea voyage I started to get a definite Tim Powers vibe from the writing, and in the second half of the novel this feeling only strengthened. Hints of On Stranger Tides and The Anubis Gates, two of my favourite books, so I was a happy girl. (Probably the card-playing scene also spoke to Powers’ work (possibly Earthquake Weather?), but I confess these leave me cold.)

Apart from these themes and the storytelling in general, I was also more than happy with the quality of the writing at the smaller scale. The dialogue felt natural (insofar as the context permitted – see Dead People, above), and the writing was full of wonderfully rich yet beautifully brief snippets of simile and metaphor. It was a pleasure to read.

Well done Lee. When’s the next one coming out?