The Adventures of Alan Shaw: A Penny Dreadful Review
I do love
an exciting adventure story. The plucky hero defeats overwhelming odds and
outwits a horrible villain. This sort of dashing tale is close to the heart of
Steampunk. There are often deranged plots to foil and airships to clamber
aboard. Therefore, Craig Hallam is to be applauded for creating The Adventures of Alan Shaw, Volume 1.
If one likes adventure, one will like Alan Shaw.
Craig
Hallam’s exciting book is a collection of novellas detailing a few of the
scrapes of young Alan Shaw. Alan Shaw is an orphan escaped from the workhouse
and surviving on the streets. He’s clever, resourceful, and a silver-tongued
little devil. In his first adventure, he stops a bomber and is adopted by a
police constable, whose son Simon teaches him to read. In later chapters, a
growing Alan encounters a shadowy organization, gypsies, a mechanical squid, a
mad scientist, and a fishing boat. Alan is everything a man of action ought to
be.
Not all of
Alan Shaw’s adventures turn out to have happy endings, however. Sometimes the
bad guys win, and sometimes the good guys get hurt or killed. Alan doesn’t
always have all the answers, and he is maneuvered like a pawn more than once.
This gives the stories depth and seriousness that one would not necessarily
expect from a book whose cover depicts a dashing young man swinging from an
airship. I rather like this dimension to the adventures, but it might not be
for everyone.
I give The
Adventures of Alan Shaw, Volume 1 four gears out of five. It is a lot of fun to
read, and I look forward to seeing what other scrapes Alan Shaw talks (or
shoots) his way out of.
Your Correspondent From The Bookstore,
Penny J. Merriweather
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