I reached for him and traced a circle on the back of his neck, where a nice fat drop of sweat dripped, and I touched it to the paper and said the word: ddfdfdfd
When I touched the paper I felt a strange sensation inside of me, an unpleasant, sticky chill, as with an infection. Then the sticky feeling rolled into something familiar and bigger and uglier, almost like shame, or a bad memory I’d tried to forget. It felt like the pressure drop before a storm, or the rumbling before an earthquake.
Alerted to a wealthy man’s desire to possess a fabled and reputedly dangerous book of sex spells by a friendly book dealer just before his death, Lily Albrecht, once a promising novelist and now a book dealer herself, takes up the search with the assistance of long-time acquaintance and casual flirtation Lucas Markson. But as subsequent events and coincidences help her, Lily begins to wonder who is leading the search, her or the book itself, and what Lucas hopes to gain while in possession of the book.
As a summary, this would seem to suggest a romance novel (or maybe porn), and that is one aspect of it, though not the only aspect, just as this is not specifically a mystery or a horror novel, and yet elements of all three genres overlap. Grounding the story is Lily’s relationship with Abel, an intellectual widely admired in academic circles for his unsentimental and unsparing views of anything he writes about. Lily and Abel became lovers almost on meeting and began a years-long relationship in which each seemed dissolved into the other until Abel suffered early onset dementia and Lily became his caretaker. Lily wants to resurrect the Abel she loved and stops at nothing to find a cure. Simultaneously, not finding a cure leaves her feeling trapped with a responsibility Abel’s family will not share, and kept from a life of prosperity, fame and well-being she had glimpsed briefly before Abel’s illness.
The titular book starts as a MacGuffin, but the possibility of it directing events is an open question throughout, generating much of the novel’s tension. For a novel that revolves around eroticism, sex and magic, Gran does a fine job of examining life expectations, self-perception and the consequences of wish fulfilment; as with much good fantasy, the use of magic exacts a price. Ultimately, what do you want? What are you willing to do to get it? How do you adapt to the consequences?
This is a solid literary erotic thriller. Lily and Abel are believable, Lucas maybe a little less so to begin with, but more so as his motivations become apparent. A variety of secondary characters appear and are given enough to do and say that none of them feels two-dimensional, including a retired general, and a witch of sorts. The plot unfolds at a good pace and Gran’s prose keeps the story flowing along, the highs and lows of Lily’s quest to find the book that will make her fortune consistently engaging. While I didn’t find any of the scenes especially frightening, there is a creepiness throughout that qualifies this as good reading for late nights in October.
THE BOOK OF THE MOST PRECIOUS SUBSTANCE by Sara Gran
Published February 2022 by Dreamland Books
ISBN: 9780578947099
319 pages
Review by Randy M. Money
