Whitechapel Gods – S.M. Peters
Whitechapel Gods is a strange take on steampunk. It is set in Victorian London. Or, Victorian London surrounds the "burough" of Whitechapel where the story unfolds. Alongside the steampunk technology there is a layer of magic and mysticism interlacing all parts of the story. The most obvious example is the two mechanical gods that control Whitechapel, but there is also the mysterious disease called the "clacks" which causes the victim to grow gears and mechanical parts under their skin.
In the book we follow the story of a few people as they struggle against the oppressive power of the machine gods. The viewpoint changes a lot in the first part of the book, making it very difficult to get a proper feeling for where the story is going. I think this is the case of Peters trying to put too much information about each character into the book. It is clear that he has created long and well thought out background for each character, but it often becomes too much as he tries to explain everything as the new characters are introduced.
As the story gets going, and the characters have been introduced, the story gets better and I started to enjoy the adventure and the challenges they encountered. Even though I found most of the characters to be likeable only one of them had much character growth, so by the end I was more interested in the overarching plot of the book that how the characters actually did. Not necessarily a bad thing, but something that I noticed as I kept reading.
The strange setting was very hard to grasp. It took a long time for me to get a feeling for the correct amount of magic and technology that I should expect. This led to a few cases where I felt like the author invented new things just to solve a problem with the plot, without actually thinking about how the choices he made should have affected the setting. What made the setting great though, even when it felt inconsistent, was the atmosphere created by the author. The characters in the book do not know much about the dangers they face, and that lack of knowledge really helped you get a feel for the fear that they felt. It reminded me a bit of the way Lovecraft conveyed the horror in his books; rarely describing anything, just describing what the characters think and fear. This is especially true as the descriptions/experience of the machine Gods arrive later on in the book.
After having finished the book I am left with a feeling that it could have been much better if Peters had given the story more place. That way he could have introduced the characters without rushing it, and I might have been allowed to get a better grasp of the whole setting. All-in-all it was a good read, without being anything spectacular.