I had an absolute blast with S. C. Mendes's debut novel, 'The City', which has reached quite an audience and I've recommended it often in horror groups. While that works well as a standalone novel, with clear beginning, middle and end, the mythology of the world Mendes created was too rich to leave alone and he chose to continue it here. While this novel also ends capably, it's even more clear that there will be a lot more to come, so this suffers the inevitable problem of being a middle book. It can't shine as a great opening, because 'The City' has already done that, and it can't shine as a grand finalé, because that's in the future somewhere however many books down the line.

Its biggest success is the continuing expansion of the mythology of what the City is, who runs it and why it's important not only to them and the clièntele they serve but to the world at large that doesn't know that it even exists. We spend a surprisingly small amount of time there, most of that following up to see what Max Elliott has been doing there after the decision he took at the end of 'The City', at the whim of Lord Valbas, one of the Mara.

I should add at this point that, while I remembered Max, this book is told from many perspectives and I couldn't recall all of the others, so I had to go back to re-read the last few chapters of 'The City'. Mendes assumes that we're up to speed and so doesn't help us out much. To be fair anyone who reads 'The City', whether for the first time or on a repeat visit, is going to want to roll straight into 'The Order of Eternal Sleep', so it's only a problem for those of us who read the first book when it was the only book.

Most of those other characters are above ground in San Francisco in what I believe is now 1913, so three years on from the events of the previous book. Ming made it to McCloud's house safely, but has moved on from there and is now working as an assassin for Shin Sho, who has his own dealings with the Mara. A massive change is coming for the Mara and their lieutenants and minions are preparing for the Rites of Eternal Sleep, which will usher in the long night and the rising of the Black Sun. What all that means we must be patient to discover, but Mendes drips information our way until we realise the true horror of it.

Many of these characters are Mara, working for them or at least aware of who they are. However, more are just regular Americans living their lives in blissful ignorance of the hidden world beneath them, so, when they stumble upon the strange and unusual, they see it as nothing more. For instance, McCloud is still on the force, and he and his partner, O'Neil, both SFPD detectives, are tasked with investigating a new ritual house of horror, a building on the fringes of Chinatown owned by Hisao Osoto, an underworld crime lord. Six burned bodies upstairs lead them to a hidden room below that contains a black altar and a traumatised child in a cage.

O'Neil is a religious man, so he takes his clues to the church, where we discover that Damian Wells isn't the Roman Catholic priest we think, and his connections to others have much deeper meaning. Mendes continues to throw characters at us until we start to attempt to organise them into good guys and bad, those who know about the City and those who don't, who's involved with the Rites of Eternal Sleep and who isn't. Even if we wouldn't have done this anyway, we're forced into it by the volume of plot strands. What are temples and what are nurseries? What's the Order of Eternal Sleep? Who's doing the Mara's bidding and who's just making a quick buck? Who's connected to whom and when and how will mutually connected friends meet? And, of course, who will stay alive long enough to do so?

In short, there's a lot here, making this a book to pay attention to. 'The City' led us relatively easily into a new secret world beyond what we knew and, while there were certainly plot strands to follow, it was a trivial task to keep up, allowing us to concentrate more fully on the vibrancy and decadence of what the City provides. While I remembered some characters and events, much of what stayed with me from 'The City' was imagery, both specific examples of it and the grand sweep of how wild and imaginative it was. Here, there are far more plot strands, far more primary characters driving them forward and far more ramifications to what might happen if they succeed or fail. We have to stay focused.

One criticism I'll echo from 'The City' is that we're very much in a historical setting, but it rarely feels as if it's a period piece. Sure, there's no internet or cellphones, so everything's done the old fashioned way but there's very little to identify this San Francisco as being 1913, beyond general hints that the change the Mara are preparing for might benefit from the world plunging into global warfare. It could be 1903 or 1923, even 1953 or 1963, as long as we think of it in black and white and, perhaps, red.

Not a criticism but a thought is that there's so much here that I wonder if keeping the book short was a good choice. 'The Order of Eternal Sleep' runs just shy of two hundred pages but there's story enough to fill four or five hundred. Maybe that would have allowed Mendes to flesh out the period backdrop and a lot more of the character of the many primary cast members. We know from 'The City' that character is a strong point for Mendes, but he just doesn't have the room here to do that and still weave all his plot strands together to wrap up the story in time. So many books would benefit from being shorter. This is a rare example of one that I think should have been longer.

At the end of the day, it's a good book. It's just a very different book to 'The City', even though it builds on what it began. I honestly can't tell at this point whether Mendes is aiming at a trilogy, with a beast of a third book to wrap everything up, or a series, which is completely viable with a mythology this rich. Either way, it's not going to end here and, as enjoyable as this book is, it's always going to end up being the volume that got us from here to there. ~~ Hal C F Astell

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