Kathryn’s Bookshelf: The Witch Watch

Book:  The Witch Watch by Shamus Young
Genre:  Low fantasy, historical fiction (kinda-sorta)
Rating:  Three out of five gears
Recommended for:  People who like low fantasy and steampunky stuff

Shamus Young is one of my favorite bloggers and a terrifically talented writer, so I was very excited for his Victorian magical steampunk-ish novel, The Witch Watch.

Alas, I was disappointed.  Maybe my expectations were too high, particularly for a first (original) novel, but I didn’t feel that The Witch Watch was as strong as Free Radical, Shamus’s “fan” novel of System Shock 2.  After some thought, I realized why.  It’s because The Witch Watch doesn’t play to Shamus’s strengths.

By far, Shamus’s biggest strength as a writer is description, particularly in terms of setting and mood.  Here’s one example (scroll down to the paragraph beginning “An old-time sanitarium”).  Here’s another (note both the blockquotes).  And, of course, Free Radical – all of Free Radical.  And pretty much all of Shamus’s writing describing games.  He’s very talented when it comes to conveying emotion, particularly his own.  (Also, Shamus is highly knowledgeable technologically, which contributed to the power of Free Radical (which, in case you couldn’t tell, I highly recommend; I read the whole thing on the edge of my seat).)

Unfortunately, it turns out that Shamus’s biggest weakness as a fiction writer is dialogue, and The Witch Watch has a lot of dialogue.  A lot.  The dialogue itself is frequently stilted, mostly because of the second major flaw of the work (discussed below), but it’s also handled poorly from a technical perspective; he uses too many unconventional dialogue tags.  About 95% of dialogue tags should be either “said” or “asked”, and the rest should be standard ones like “shouted” or “whispered”.  Unconventional tags like “admitted” should be used sparingly.  New writers tend to think it’s uncreative or repetitive to use “said” all the time, but to paraphrase How Not to Write a Novel, the reason authors use “said” is that the reader glosses right over it.  If your character asseverates something, expect your reader to lose immersion.  Shamus also makes the equally common mistake of not enough dialogue tags in a few places; no reader wants to have to go back to the last dialogue tag and start counting off paragraphs to figure out who’s talking on the next page.

The second major weakness of the book is language.  The Witch Watch is set in Victorian England (well, a version of Victorian England where magic exists), but it isn’t written in Victorian English (nor, thankfully, is it written in 21st century American English).  It’s written in a painful hybrid that, like Pride and Prejudice and Zombies or 99% of Harry Potter fanfiction, is clearly written by someone working in a dialect of English that isn’t his own.  It’s hard to point to specific places where this showed through, but for me at least, the contrast between setting and language was so stark that I had a lot of difficulty becoming fully immersed in the story.  (Contrast Patricia C. Wrede’s A Matter of Magic, which is set in Regency England plus magic but doesn’t have this problem.)

And that was a shame, because The Witch Watch is an original story with engaging characters.  Shamus’s system of magic is well-thought-out and internally consistent, and the plot is exciting and interesting.  I’m trying to avoid spoilers, so I won’t discuss it further here, but I was very definitely not bored at any point!  I liked all three of the protagonists, and secondary characters like the patron of the Witch Watch added a lot of flavor to the story.  The villains, both minor and major, were also inspired; I really enjoyed cheering for their downfall.  The story leaves the possibility of a sequel open, which would be great.

In short, while I was disappointed by The Witch Watch, I do still recommend it for fans of low fantasy, steampunk-y stories.  It’s good value for your $5.