The Blurb:
There are dark forces at work in our world (and in Manchester in particular), so thank God The Stranger Times is on hand to report them . . .
A weekly newspaper dedicated to the weird and the wonderful (but mostly the weird), it is the go-to publication for the unexplained and inexplicable.
At least that’s their pitch. The reality is rather less auspicious. Their editor is a drunken, foul-tempered and foul-mouthed husk of a man who thinks little of the publication he edits. His staff are a ragtag group of misfits. And as for the assistant editor . . . well, that job is a revolving door – and it has just revolved to reveal Hannah Willis, who’s got problems of her own.
When tragedy strikes in her first week on the job The Stranger Times is forced to do some serious investigating. What they discover leads to a shocking realisation: some of the stories they’d previously dismissed as nonsense are in fact terrifyingly real. Soon they come face-to-face with darker forces than they could ever have imagined.
The Review:
The Stranger Times is a comedic urban fantasy book that centers around the “news” reported by a small newspaper in Manchester. The eponymous newspaper, the Stranger Times, focuses on stories that some may call “fanciful”, “ridiculous”, or “a load of bollocks”. UFO abductions, haunted toilets, werewolf sightings… they’re all here.
Much of the story in this series-starter revolves around a young woman named Hannah, a one-time toff who is now slumming it following an un-amicable divorce. Searching for a new job — and, if we’re being honest, something to do with herself — she stumbles into an interview for our new favourite newspaper. The editor, one Vincent Banecroft, is a manchild of the well-worn British sitcom variety. Abrasive, coarse, and at least casually racist, he’s at the center of most of the jokes this book tries to make.
The best explanation for Vincent Banecroft is that he is Ireland’s gift to the English to thank us for all the nice things we’ve done to them over the years.
So that’s the background. The story goes pretty much exactly where you’d expect it to from there. Magic is real — gasp! — and our unfortunate characters have no idea. Doubly unfortunate is that someone who is basically an evil wizard is waltzing around Manchester killing and abducting people.
Look. It’s hard to review or critique something that’s supposed to be funny. Humour is subjective, you’ll be surprised to hear. But there’s also an element of where to draw the line between judging a comedic book as a story, and judging it by how it made you laugh or smile. Books like Kings of the Wyld get praise from some readers (me included) for the laughs and nostalgia they bring. Others may think there’s too much silliness and not enough structure. There’s a balance there, but the thing is that the balancing point is different for every person.
For me, I’d say The Stranger Times is more Kings of the Wyld than it is Bloody Rose. I thought it leaned on its jokes quite heavily in some spaces, and relied on the tropes of the genre to get it from point A to point B. It read like a story I’d seen before a hundred times, but with different characters and different specifics. Which isn’t a bad thing in and of itself. There’s nothing wrong with tropey fiction. But such stories do depend on the strength of those specifics and characters.
Personally… I don’t think I connected with them all too well. At least not entirely. There were some aspects that I enjoyed, like the found family aspect as Hannah settled into life with her new co-workers, or the healing aspect as Banecroft showed glimpses of the man he could be. One or two of the jokes and character interactions made me smile. But others made me wince.
There are a few places in The Stranger Times where racism or homophobia are played for laughs. The bigoted comments are always made by antagonistic characters — and I’m including the loud-mouthed Banecroft in that, as he’s a very antagonistic protagonist — and they’re almost always called out or made to pay for these (sometimes quite loaded) remarks. On a few occasions, though, it’s the calling out that’s set up as the punchline.
To give an example of what I mean, the most obvious of these is when Banecroft refers to an employee he has worked with for a significant period of time as “the Chinese one”. When accused of being racist, he bats the conversation over to the aforementioned employee, who says, “I am. I’m proper Chinese, me”, thus setting up the accuser as the punchline.
On another occasion, the main antagonist assures a woman at a bar that he could rape her if he wanted to. He doesn’t want to. But he could. Y’know, to show that he’s an arsehole, but not quite a rapey arsehole.
I don’t think I’m the person to pass judgement on the above points, but I highlight them so that you have a more informed view and can make your own decisions regarding the book.
Outside of what I’ve already mentioned, the humour is mostly of the silly and slapstick variety. Loud characters, identifiable mostly via their individual quirks, thrust into ridiculous situations with a focus on the absurd. The story didn’t really do much to set it apart from any other comic or urban fantasies for me, but then I usually think that the first books in such series are often the weakest.
The Stranger Times is like Mick Herron’s Slough House meets Ben Aaronovitch’s Rivers of London via a BBC sitcom office in Manchester. While I had my issues with it, I’m disappointed that I didn’t love it as much as I wanted to.
We received a copy of this book from the publisher via Netgalley in exchange for a fair and honest review.
