Book: The Magician Who Bought Dreams
Author: Vikkram Dewan
Genre: Supernatural Mystery
Publisher: Palette Books (English imprint of Sahitya Vimarsh)
Pages: 208
Price: ₹250
Blurb (as on the back cover):
Welcome to the world of the supernatural and crypt ―where nothing is what it seems!
A magician who buys people's dreams before making them vanish. A mysterious radio that makes you listen to people talking to God. Find out how seductive the shape shifting 'Whore of Babylon’ can be. Or how a cursed wine glass can become a one way portal to other worlds. Listen to the confessions of the first White Tantrik in whose skewed world view Black is White and Magic is Right.
The concept is intriguing, isn't it? Mysterious. It's a collection of five short stories: The Magician Who Bought Dreams, The God’s Radio, Strange Love with a Succubus Demon, The Cursed Glass and The Confessions of Warlock.
The first two stories are detective, which feature a detective duo: Mishti (a 13-14 year old girl) and Jogawar (a fifty year old man). They are easy going, thorough professionals. I liked this idea.
However, there are certain things that I found problematic that kind of distracted me from the main storylines.
Writing/storytelling. While I liked the concept, I didn't connect with the writing style. The writing doesn't create a mysterious aura or imagery which was required for these kinds of stories. I guess that's because the stories whiz past where they need to go a bit slow, whereas at many places, they appear to be meandering (unnecessary incidents/conversations).
There's no fixed point of view or synchronisation in the narration. In short stories, a fixed pov and orderly narrative work better, in my opinion, and even if you want to switch, you have to do it seamlessly.
Characters:
As I said, I liked the idea of the unusual Misti-Jogawar jodi, but there's no introduction of the characters and how they came together solving the cases.
I’m presuming it's the first book featuring the duo. Even if it's not, I wanted to know how they met, what prompted them to investigate these cases together. How did they become so comfortable that they lived together etc?
Editing: there are several editing errors. And not just grammatical errors, this book requires a round of structural editing as well. I am particularly surprised because this is from a traditional publishing house.
These things collectively disrupted the flow of reading. For me, the otherwise promising storylines didn't turn out very enjoyable.
About the author:
Vikkram Dewan is a Delhi based author, editor and researcher on Occult, paranormal, satanist cults and beliefs. He writes historical fiction, thrillers and adventure stories with elements of horror and paranormal.
His publishing credits include 3 novels in English and 3 novels in Hindi, and several articles and short stories.
I received this book from the publisher for an honest review.
Interesting! And I remembered to sign in from Chrome this time. Hehehe
ReplyDeleteThank you! ๐๐
DeleteThank you for giving your honest take about the book. This is the first book featuring Mishti and Jogawar. As these were stories so main focus was on that. Their characters would be explored in the next book which is a novel and hence has more scope for the character exploration. We'll be keeping the points mentioned here in mind so that our next books don't have these issues.
ReplyDeleteThank you!
Delete