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A woozy, psychological puzzle that reminds me of Paul Auster’s New York Trilogy (especially as it deals with writing and writers), or Borges, except it’s heartbreaking, too. The prose is fantastic – clear and sharp, but with unexpected flights of imagination. It’s a wonderful book.
When Fellows, resident of the Quarantined City of the title, a colourful Mitteleuropean port, first reads of the short tales of Boursier, he is intrigued; he once harboured ambitions to be a writer himself, and something about the description of these stories chimes with him. When he tracks some down and reads them, he discovers they have a transmutative force – the streets of the city begin to shift uncertainly around him. They also force him to look back at events in the past he’d almost forgo...
Wine sodden lockdown nebulous geographylet the ghost poke you.
I was pretty impressed with this. Genuinely creepy and intriguing - Everington gets the dreamy / nightmarish quality just right. The style is strongly reminiscent of Thomas Ligotti or Laird Barron. I can't help but compare this to Wyl Menmuir's Booker-longlisted novel, The Many. It's interesting that a book like that, which has been marketed as literary fiction, attracts plaudits for its moody otherworldly melancholia, whereas a superior work like The Quarantined City (in my view), which has bee...
I thoroughly enjoyed this book which I would class as literary fiction first and foremost and latterly a slipstream novel (mixing as it does elements of horror, fantasy, and possibly science fiction). Everington's style is intriguing and engaging and the stories within the story which then affect the story are well-handled. There is just the right balance of off-centredness which anchors the piece in its internal logic and the denouement ably concludes without seeming out of place or becoming tr...
In the lockdown of a nameless city, a man seeks meaning through the ambiguous, esoteric writings of a subversive author. By turns psychological thriller and surrealist melodrama, Everington’s THE QUARANTINED CITY is a subtle, erudite affair with elements of Bank’s THE BRIDGE and the existential anxieties typified in Kafka’s DAS SCHLOSS. The narrative is rich and evocative, and restrains the core conceit (the mystery of the city itself and its vacuity in the eyes of its protagonist) with deft fla...
This is a story about stories - those we are told, those we tell others, and those we tell to ourselves. The Quarantined City is a prison of sorts - exotic but familiar, repulsive yet fascinating in its baroque nooks and fractal repetitions. As we wander down its streets with Fellows, our guide, we find our perceptions subtly shifting. Why is the broken ghost always reaching for him; who is Boursier, the elusive writer and how are his stories escaping the page; when will the Unity Government fin...
The Quarantined City is meanwhile literature’s only exorcism of whoever reads it, whoever reads it in its own hyper-imaginative spirit, assuming that you, Mr or Ms Read, do read it at all, to discover whether I am right or not. An erected cornucopia of champagne glasses fizzing out celebratory cascades of bubbly Alzheimer in ‘moto perpetuo’ from one to the other. Or a house of cards. Sharped and shuffled pages.The detailed review of this book posted elsewhere under my name is too long to post he...
