Kim Newman has had a seemingly effortless career as novelist and critic, not unlike the three protagonists of The Quorum, who make a deal to persecute one of their friends in return for fame and fortune. However, Mark, Mickey and Michael discover that you should be careful what you wish for...

The Quorum by Kim Newman is a Titan reprint of his 1994 novel. Told over multiple decades, and not in chronological order, the book charts the Quorum’s rise between the seventies and the nineties, a time of great excess, when wealth seemed to come easy, but every party has to end and the deal the Quorum made with a mysterious creature has a price.

In what could have been a very dark tale, Newman is still able to wrestle a lot of dark humour from the plot, especially with Neil, the hapless object, whom the Quorum persecute in return for their fortunes. The higher they fly the lower they have to keep Neil. It’s an odd Faustian deal and one that makes little sense at the start, although one suspects that the whole thing is tied into the machine which the creature, Leech, posing as a highly successful, human, entrepreneur is building.

If you didn’t catch the book on its original run you may be surprised that, although there are genre elements in the story, with this book Newman is closer to satirical literature than he is with his successful Dracula series of books.

This is a book which demands your attention. From the first page you’re thrown into the depths of a mystery involving the Quorum, the solution is slowly revealed as the chapters skip across the decades. The only problem with this mystery is that the back jacket tells you what is happening, which is a bit of a shame, as it removes some of the bite from the book.

The book, as a whole, runs to five hundred and eleven pages, although The Quorum only takes up three hundred and ninety-eight of those. The book contains a further six short stories, mostly set either in or adjacent to the timeline of the main novel.

Well written with a good pace, the book's only flaws are the constant jumping around in time and the fact that apart from a speech impediment it was often difficult to distinguish between the members of the Quorum. Otherwise it’s well worth a read.

7

Charles Packer