Book Review: The Curator by Owen King

I do usually like to go into a book more or less blind, with only the blurb and the cover to guide me. In this case I didn’t even read the blurb; the cover and the author were enough to have me hitting ‘pre-order’ when it popped up on my Facebook news feed. I’d previously read the book he co-wrote with his father, Stephen King, and loved it. It had a dreamier quality than his father’s usual work, but still that sense of personal horror that I adore (it’s no secret that I’m a huge King fan). So I went into this with no preconceptions and lots of faith.

I was not disappointed – but I was definitely surprised!

I was not expecting the pseudo-Victorian post-war fantasy that was unfurled to me in the initial pages, somehow dreamy and gritty at the same time, but I immediately fell in love with it. It’s never quite ascertained if The City is in our past world, some distant future where civilisation has had to start again, or from a different world entirely, but mentions of real-world places like Paris and London suggest that it is at least alongside our own. The world is instantly recognisable, yet remains always somewhat ‘other’ by the small details – the mysterious stone monoliths towering over The City, strange symbols from a distant past detailed on everyday objects, the ever-present cats who are worshipped like small gods. The people are real; their struggles are real; a people in the subsiding echoes of a victorious rebellion against an uncaring monarchy and cruel upper classes. Owen King introduces us to disparate groups of individuals and instantly makes them vivid and tangible to the reader.

The story is not told in its chronological order; instead, it leaps back and forth, colouring the main storyline with reports on what came before, explaining the rebellion that the reader just missed in excerpts as it becomes relevant. As this happens, those disparate groups slowly start to seem less disparate; the narrative weaves their stories together in an artful braiding of storylines, bringing us closer and closer to revelations that we know are coming but which we still can’t quite figure out ahead of time. The mysterious Society slowly reveals its secrets as this braid takes shape. It is a highly skilled weaving of multiple storylines into one plot that slowly builds the pace of the book until the reader is rushing through the last chapters, as out of breath as the characters.

In short, a beautiful novel written beautifully, with a stunning cover. Owen King has clearly learned a lot from his father, but he has his own unique voice as well.