Goodbye, crazy people

I'd been looking forward to Night Fall by Simon R. Green since the advertisement for it at the end of his last Secret Histories novel, since it meant the characters from that series were going to finally share space with his earlier Nightside series, which evidently ended before I started this blog.

A quick rundown on the Nightside...

Nightside is kind of a pocket reality hidden in London, kind of an adult version of The Phantom Tollbooth. Normal reality goes out the window in Nightside, where sin is available to all seekers, timeslips bring in people from all over the universe, aliens, alternate dimensions, etc all exist within. The Nightside is supervised by The Advisors, who in turn are represented by someone with the title Walker. At the start of this volume, Walker is John Taylor, who was the narrator of the Nightside series. Trying to to spoil too much, John is the child of the supernatural entity that formed the Nightside, is married to Shotgun Suzie, and is about to become a father.

Edward Drood, on the other hand, is still working with the Drood family, who are bound and determined to save humanity, whether they like it or not. So, when the borders of the Nightside start expanding for reasons they can't easily discern, the Droods send Eddie in along with Molly Metcalf to figure out what's actually happening, violating ancient pacts that have kept the Droods out of Nightside.

This doesn't go well, and we follow both men as a war inevitably starts breaking out. Eventually, the Droods use Alpha Red Alpha to shift the entire manor into Nightside for what they assume will be a bloodless coup.

Which doesn't happen.

Along the way, characters from both series pop in and out of the narrative, along with JC from Ghostfinders, who eventually helps end the war towards the end. In the end, we get resolution on just about everything, although the final wrap up is kind of abrupt. (It also conforms that Ishmael Jones is not part of this universe.)

I really enjoyed seeing John and Edward sharing the same pages, since they're really two sides of the same character. They do end up pulling a Kirk meets Picard towards the end, which honestly had me cheering while eating my lunch today.

I'm sad to see the world end, but what a ride it was. Although you never know how permanent such endings are, sometime things do come back even in a cameo.