Musiccosmos

“He was shot, staked through the heart and buried at a crossroads, after the burning of Columbia. . . . Or he might’ve gone to San Francisco.  No one really knows.” This passage has next to nothing to do with the main plot of Josh Reynolds’ delightful novel  The Whitechapel Demon (Emby Press, 2013). It’s fairly telling of the work’s tone, though, which manages to balance the dark and gruesome with the light and witty. And this entertaining tone strikes me as one of Reyonds’ greatest strengths as a writer, his ability to make a reader cringe on one page and then snicker on the next. Those comic moments are particularly welcome, given that the story’s primary villain is a demonic doppelgänger of no less than Jack the Ripper. I say primary villain because there are variations on villainy in this story, some of which are entirely human. This book chronicles the first novel-length adventure of Reynolds’ occult detective Charles St. Cyprian. With the feisty (read: prone to v...