This delightful, sometimes spooky, always intelligent and exciting novel is truly a work of an imagination at the height of its (often astonishing) powers. Adam McOmber takes us deep into a magical world that resembles our own, one that is set in Victorian England, which it’s clear from page one was meticulously researched, and doesn’t release us until long after we read the last paragraph. . . . The White Forest is a very satisfying, always suspenseful and surprising page-turner . . . and beautifully written too. Adam McOmber has offered us a work of fiction that is unlike any other I have read, and I’m recommending it to every reader I know.
The White Forest reminds me of what I love about H.P. Lovecraft. Adam McOmber’s imagery is so visceral and strangely real, and his story so inventive; a plain old narrative is hard enough to pull off on its own, but creating a whole new world within the reality of Victorian England? Wow.
What other novelist could take a Victorian gothic setting, the most obscure elements of medieval cosmology, a sinister secret society, and an old-fashioned love triangle to produce, in tautly elegant prose, something so delightful and utterly unique? The White Forest is much more than a novel: it is a magic lantern, casting dark and flickering pictures from other worlds. I wish I had written it myself.
Adam McOmber’s voice is exquisitely fresh … at once fierce and sensual.
The White Forest drips with the dark and gothic chills of Victorian London. Adam McOmber will keep you up nights with this eerie tale that grafts mystery to myth. A spooky and original novel.
Like the Wunderkammern of the 17th and 18th centuries—so named because they were supposed to evoke wonder, a state their assemblers felt precipitated all true knowledge—the cabinet of curiosity that is Adam McOmber’s My House Gathers Desires will leave its readers in wonder, well on their way to discovering the nature of the relationship between doppelgängers, revenants, demons, and those haunted by them. It is an exquisite feeling, thrilling, terrifying and fascinating. I started reading the book again as soon as I had finished.
In Adam McOmber’s lucid dream of a novel, the beloved disciple follows the risen Yeshua on a voyage across the sea to the eternal city. Within the streets of Rome, they will come to the door of a mysterious structure known as the Gray Palace, within whose walls wait horrors and revelations. A contemporary descendant of such works as Par Lagerkvist’s Barabbas and Nikos Kazantzakis’s Last Temptation of Christ, Jesus and John looks at the greatest story ever told through fresh, kaleidoscopic lenses and discovers marvels.
Adam McOmber’s Jesus and John is an unsettling and sumptuously written reimagining of the gospels that blends religious and sensual ecstasy in a haunting and incantatory brew. Riveting and unmissable.
ADAM McOMBER 