The Old Clock Peddler
Portals between worlds and shifts of power impact the residents of a fantastical town in the portentous fantasy novel The Old Clock Peddler.
In David Morabito’s interdimensional fantasy novel The Old Clock Peddler, a salesman goes on adventures with the help of magical clocks, impacting distant lands.
The book begins in medias res, after Poppa, a powerful, dangerous man in the city of Lexicon, dies. Poppa’s wealth and influence transfer to his son, Surf. Even as the townspeople react to Surf’s rise to power, a mysterious peddler exerts his influence, and the secretive City Fathers exercise their own powers too.
Momentum is generated by the peddler’s return to Lexicon and the consequences of Poppa’s demise. People attempt to destroy the magical clocks that function as portals, hoping to close the doors to the land of Yore. Allusions are made to an earlier plot involving several of the book’s characters, as well as to previous adventures utilizing the clocks. For series newcomers, these reference points are too roundabout, though. The stakes of this volume, and the relationship of its events to previous ones, are at first vague as a result. Further, instances of exposition bog the story down—in particular when these are devoted to information that’s been covered elsewhere.
Further, while the story follows a number of individuals investigating the nature and powers of the clocks, the supernatural peddler is the most focal. Though he is in poor health and messy, his behavior is silly and whimsical; his scenes are sometimes ridiculous and are at other times gross. Indeed, he has a fairy-tale presence in an otherwise serious narrative. The whimsy he brings is somewhat present elsewhere, but it is nowhere as concentrated as it is in interludes devoted to him and his workshop-between-worlds, or to his disguised wanderings through the streets of Lexicon.
The prose is light and intriguing, though it includes instances of repetition and nonspecificity that are distracting. Indeed, many of its descriptions are halting and imprecise. Further, the characters are too prone to describing the actions already covered in the narrative; their conversations are stilted and flat. The inclusion of accents and distinctive manners of speech add enlivening variety; however, the cadence and tone are unvarying on the whole, leading to narrative drag. And the ending is anticlimactic, dependent on a flat, unsatisfying declaration related to inherited trauma and an heirloom of Poppa’s.
In the fanciful fantasy novel The Old Clock Peddler, people go on interdimensional adventures and contend with a conspiracy.
Reviewed by
Brendan McKelvy
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