Addicted to Escape: A Review of Tim Power's Medusa's Web | John Herreid | CWR's The Dispatch
Powers' new novel is a heady mix of Hollywood ghost story—describing long-lost neighborhoods and places as well as people—and an inventive revisionist take on familiar myths.
Fear is underrated by most people. Fearlessness is what gets lauded. But fear is an essential part of a healthy perspective on life. If we don't fear a hot stove, we may get burned; if we don't fear wild animals, we may end up like one of those sentimental wilderness lovers eaten by Alaskan bears.
But nowhere is fear more absent these days than in regard to spirituality. Current writers and filmmakers (with rare exceptions) depict demonic and occult themes as being fascinating topics for fiction, but with no bearing on reality. This means that many of their efforts come off as curiously lightweight, if not dangerously blasé. But apart from the seriousness of evil on a moral plane, this lack of regard for spiritual danger results in works that are often artistically inert.
This is what makes the works of Tim Powers stand out. As a believing Catholic, his fiction straddles the eerie line between the real and unreal. Most of his books involve the occult, and the message is always the same: here be dragons. Do not touch. In Powers’ novels the unknown chaos of the occult may be seductive at first, but it always exacts a price, and often consumes what is human about those who are attracted to it.
His newest novel, Medusa’s Web, is a heady mix of Hollywood ghost story—describing long-lost neighborhoods and places as well as people—and an inventive revisionist take on familiar myths. Powers’ historical research is, as always, impeccable. As when I’ve read his other books, I occasionally came across some factoid or another that seemed just too far-fetched. “Oh come on, Powers is making stuff up now,” I think, and pull up the web to search for the incident—which invariably really happened.
Powers is known for this. In constructing his novels, he becomes a human Wikipedia: stumbling across some interesting incident or person from history and then cross-referencing it with other events and people.
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