The Shambling Guide to New York City

The Shambling Guide to New York City is the first full length published novel by American podcaster and short fiction writer, Mur Lafferty. Lafferty has gained prominence in recent years through a successful podcast and self publishing several novellas, leading to awards and nominations from Parsec and Hugo.

The Shambling Guide to New York is the first entry in what will be a series of Shambling Guides. The book follows Zoe Norris, a travel writer and recent arrival in New York City. Zoe is desperate to make a fresh start in the city following a disastrous office affair at her previous job. Her early job enquiries have not borne fruit. It’s part desperation and part curiosity that finds her applying to a mysterious role as a travel editor at Underground Publishing.

Despite being warned that a job at Underground Publishing was in no way suitable for her, Zoe couldn’t have expected to find herself in a world of the supernatural, hidden in plain sight amongst the regular humans in the city. Underground Publishing are writing a travel book for the ‘coterie’, supernatural beings of all types who come to the city to live or visit. This is where The Shambling Guide really shines. Lafferty writes a cast of fascinating and diverse supernatural characters. Not just the usual zombies and vampires, but also an incubus, sprites of different varieties and zoetists, who are the only human types of coterie; capable of creating living constructs out of inanimate matter. For zoetists, think Frankenstein’s Monster for a start, but also golems and much more interesting entities as the story progresses.

Interestingly, zombies in Lafferty’s universe are not just mindless, shambling brain munchers. They can be functioning members of coterie society, providing they have a steady supply of human brains. Indeed, the coterie are not secret to all. Some sympathetic organisations, such as blood banks and mortuaries provide for the coterie and help to keep the balance between them and the human population. Where the balance tips, Public Works are on hand to act as police between the two populations, stomping down a zombie attack on a human, or an unruly fire sprite as necessary.

This is an extremely rich supernatural world and it’s fantastic to follow Zoe’s explorations in to it. She discovers how the coterie hide in plain sight, how such a diverse society functions and how they might like to spend their time upon visiting the big city. It all plays out in the first two thirds of the book like the early episodes of the first season of a TV show, making this a great page turner that develops as a series of strange happenings cause disruption to the coterie world.

Sadly, the quality drops a little in the final third of the book. The pace ramps up too quickly as a big action sequence plays out. It’s such an escalation from the early pace that it almost feels like skipping from the early episodes of a new TV show to the final episode of the final season. The description of the action becomes a little confused and hard to follow and turns what could have been a big climax in to a bit of a muddle.

This slight disappointment shouldn’t detract from an excellent first entry into this interesting new universe. Many readers will be keen to get their hands on the follow up, Ghost Train to New Orleans, due sometime in 2014.