Talks with the Moon King by Mitchell Hall

Mortlock had already discovered a dozen, not including the main entrance.”

“There were said to be one hundred and one ways into the Lunane’s Palace. I’m not yet sure what such a centre actually is, but there was immediately brought to my mind the disastrous fire yesterday at a listed Glasgow art school building… Art is Promise, after all. Here, I must point out a mention of a Promise Centre in this city that has just been reported to Lottie to have suffered a fire, the very one she happened to be visiting next. I’m also already getting a feel for the intriguing (dynastic?) effects of the moon, for example, a cross between Foolishness and Fullishness, and the more dangerous Dark, and the time of day told by measurements of Wane. Here, a different character, Lottie, a jobbing artist, one, I sense, feistily full of sexual as well as creative life, with a self-conscious fringe sometimes used to hide an ‘imperfection’ of one of her eyes, in a city that I am already getting a feel for. Nor do I intend, in future, to adumbrate the plot (for fear of spoilers), but merely my reactions to it. I do not intend to real-time review such short sections of text in future, but as I get bedded into the book, I may do so at first. “She understood the inherent fragility of art.” I therefore intend to take it slowly, using it as an accompanying ‘moon’ or internet ‘cloud’, a backdrop to my other more snappy book reviews over a longish period. I relish the prospect of savouring it, being imbued by its ‘world’.

This is a substantial work, just by judging it as a handleable object of pages and text and ‘look’ of that text by riffling through it. Waking up to find oneself treated like royalty after a drunken occasion in a so enticingly expressed world (appealing to an already awake reader’s sense of textured SF or Fantasy) where the changing fullness and darkness of a moon seems to pervade it – astrologically? (I’ve long been interested in astrology’s planetary harmonics and their synchronous tides in tune with our lives, rather than their cause-and-effect but here I may be altered back toward cause-and-effect? We may eventually see.) I have only read the first chapter so far, but I am already enthralled while being woken to this book. “Pieces of recent history resurfaced in his bruised brain like stormy flotsam.”

Talks with the Moon King by Mitchell Hall