The Bone Clocks 

In The Bone Clocks, David Mitchell pulls back the curtain from a world of magic and horror which we could only glimpse in prior works that ostensibly share the same setting. In doing so, as a writer, he moves closer to the likes of J.K. Rowling and Stephen King in promising a growing body of fantasy works, connected more loosely than Rowling’s Harry Potter and more tightly than King’s works that often share subtle cross-references.

Indeed, even the plot will remind Stephen King’s constant readers of Doctor Sleep, a similar tale of soul vampires who attain immortality by murdering children who possess magical powers, so much so that one almost wonders whether the two writers are in cahoots. (King, for his part, seems to enjoy Mitchell’s works and reviewed Mitchell’s previous, The Thousand Autumns of Jacob de Zoet, very positively.)

The Bone Clocks is an entertaining fantasy novel, to be sure, in which Mitchell displays the same mastery for multi-layered storytelling, from the individual’s struggles to the system-level effects of our individual actions, spanning centuries. As he throws his characters into an epic confrontation, the gearwork of his plot becomes a little too visible, and his characters turn into stock heroes and villains.

It’s hard to be disappointed for long since there’s a lot of payoff, a lot of clever connections and revelations related to previous works, and the implied promise of seeing more of this world Mitchell is creating, and meeting again some of the odd, wonderful, occasionally despicable people that inhabit it.