Night Shade Books

Price: $24.95

ISBN: 9781597801225

Review by Cherie Priest

The Detective Inspector Chen novels by Liz Williams have received broad critical acclaim even as reviewers have struggled to classify and pigeonhole them. Now, having read my first sampling of this franchise, I have a better understanding of why they seem so tough to talk about. It isn’t the imagery or the mythos, though these things are astonishingly rich and varied; and it isn’t the setting, which is admittedly strange but it’s familiar, too. It’s some combination of these things, with the added seasoning of a vibrant cast and linguistic flair, that makes this series a difficult subject of conversation. I mean, as a reviewer I can’t just say, “I totally liked this book and stuff.” I’m expected to say something intelligent…or at least competently descriptive.

So let’s begin with the description: This is a novel about Detective Inspector Chen, who’s married to one demon and professionally partnered with another, and together they all live and work within a place called Singapore Three–when they aren’t traveling back and forth to heaven and hell on business. One day the demon partner goes missing along with a guardian badger who is sometimes a tea kettle; and also there is a tiger demon masquerading as a Bollywood actress.

See? It’s like telling your friends what a great movie Donnie Darko is, and then trying to explain the bit about time-travel and menacing bunny costumes. It’s difficult to convey the richness and cool when you break the story down to the sum of its parts.

Therefore, let’s invoke another comparison instead–The Shadow Pavilion reminded me of nothing I’d ever read before, except possibly Gabriel Garcia Marquez. This is magical realism at its finest, handled much in the manner of Marquez, which is to say, there’s a certain presentational matter-of-factness that makes the magic easier to swallow.

And like Marquez, Williams is writing about a culture which is foreign to me, personally–and probably to a significant percentage of her audience.

I think this foreignness made me more forgiving of the story’s odder points because I was forced to take as a given that this was the mythology of another place, and I was only a visitor there. I believed that if I paid attention, I’d catch on eventually; and after awhile, I did become more automatically accepting of peculiar new elements.

As I previously confessed, Shadow Pavilion is the first of these Detective Inspector Chen novels I’ve read, and this no doubt worked against me, at least initially. For the first few chapters I felt like I’d been thrown into the deep end of a pool and told to swim, but before long I found the groove. And let me assure you, it’s absolutely worth the time and trouble to do so. Though I might have missed some of the subtleties of established characters (and sometimes I definitely felt like I was missing something), there’s much to love about this universe, and much to love about this novel, in particular.