The Invisible Woman By James P. Blaylock
PS Publishing (February 2025)
Review by W.D. Gagliani
Because The Invisible Woman is a sequel to James P. Blaylock’s Pennies From Heaven (2023), I’ll first need to weave some threads from a review of that novel here.
If you are already a fan you know Blaylock was one of the pioneers of the Steampunk genre (along with Tim Powers and K.W. Jeter) and later produced a notable series of unrelated “California Gothics.” Anyone who hasn’t read, at the very least, Homunculus, Lord Kelvin’s Machine (and the related St. Ives steampunky adventures), The Digging Leviathan, The Last Coin, The Paper Grail, Knights of the Cornerstone, All the Bells on Earth, and especially Night Relics, The Rainy Season, and Winter Tides, should go and do so right now. These novels form the backbone of his corner of the fantasy field, the one that’s magic realism, fantasy, horror, and SF adjacent. Because they have given me much pleasure over these many years, I confess to some bias up-front.
In Pennies From Heaven, the laid-back married couple Jerry and Jane Larkin had moved into a historic house in Old Orange, one of those California small towns replete with ghosts and secret lore. Pragmatic realist Jane, now the head of the local Co-Op, patiently tolerates Jerry’s eccentric view of the world. For his part, Jerry calls to mind a slightly more grown-up version of Andrew Vanbergen (The Last Coin) or Walt Stebbins (All the Bells on Earth), to name just two of Blaylock’s memorable protagonists, a slave mostly to his somewhat wacky sense of humor if not those others’ penchant for outlandish schemes and Quixotic quests. In quick succession the Larkins are treated to a new acquaintance in the form of Lettie Phibbs, a massive earthquake, and an imminent storm complete with dangerous flooding.
Phibbs — another stellar Blaylock creation — is a sketchy librarian who runs the town’s Antiquity Center and seems to wield both money and influence, and she wants to partner with Jane in the Co-Op. Greedy and manipulative, perhaps even desperate, Phibbs suspects that the earthquake may have unearthed something very valuable beneath the Larkin home, so she sets a collision course with the Larkins themselves, engaging in a series of small, sharp transgressions that are a patented characteristic of most Blaylock villains. But Jerry has her number, as it were, just as she seems to have his — and the way the two dance around each other’s dislike gives the novel its forward motion. Unlike most “fast” thrillers, the slow-burning suspense is driven by normal people facing increasingly unnerving situations created by unusual villains and their often labyrinthine machinations.
As a typical Blaylock, Pennies From Heaven does not easily fit genre slots. The inevitable collision of the Larkins and Phibbs reaches a shocking level reminiscent of that in Night Relics, and the convergence of actions (and genres) fulfills the novel’s satisfying arc.
Blaylock’s villains are always singularly, subtly unhinged, and in the case of The Invisible Woman, the antagonist from the previous novel returns with a mysterious quest, interacting with the Larkins and a new set of characters — some of whom are deeply involved in a crime from the past, and at least one of whom fits the weirdly, subtly unhinged category. Because Jerry is in the midst of remodeling an old boarding house into a pub, his imminent unearthing of a series of incriminating Polaroid photographs threatens to implicate a wealthy developer in a decades-old, covered-up Satanic ritual-style murder. The developer’s soulless vision of a retro-themed, new-but-old-looking town of Orange is revealed when a mysterious someone sends Jane Larkin’s phone an augmented-reality video app. Various players commit acts of strange, inept harassment, such as stealing a bookmobile and torching a community garden. The developer’s co-conspirators, however, are variously interested in blackmail, betrayal, and/or justice, and the divergent motives lead to both further arson and multiple murder by contract killer.
While not as steeped in the fantastic as, say, The Last Coin, the combined novels Pennies From Heaven (with at least one actual ghostly presence) and The Invisible Woman sit comfortably between that earlier classic tour de force and the “quieter” gothics whose most intriguing supporting character is sometimes the haunted California landscape and its unusual lore. Arguably not squarely in the horror genre, it’s more a mystery that lies on the cusp of both horror and (perhaps strangely) even mainstream fiction, with its details about protecting a town’s environment and its very soul from unfettered corporate ambition, what might be termed “modern regressive progress.” On the heels of Pennies From Heaven, this multi-layered novel is a meticulously written contemporary tale with elements that are at once whimsical, fantastic, exciting, dangerous, and yet grounded in memorable characters… it’s another Blaylock gem and a worthy addition to his quirky canon.
