The Music of Razors

by Cameron Rogers

Ballantyne Books $13.95; 314 pp

If you read unexpurgated Grimm’s fairy tales, you find horrors, from the mild horror of the bloody-footed sisters of Cinderella to the full blown horror of “The Juniper Tree” or “The Robber Bridegroom.” Fairy tales keep their thumb on the dark pulse, where evils are numerous and many-faced and the only virtues are integrity, resiliency, kindness, and the intuition which goes ignored to one’s dire peril.

The Music of Razors is a modern fairy tale that draws interconnecting story lines into a complicated knot, fleshing out the quote at the novel’s beginning: “Anyone alive is bait for demons.” There is a forgotten angel stripped of its powers, “an unlimited potentiality without possibility of use;” but he has planned ahead for just such an indignity, seeding the earth with slivers of silver bone from a murdered angel, which exert influences on the susceptible. In the most heart-wrenching story line, four and a half-year-old Walter is manipulated by a mysterious red-haired entity so that he loses the protection of his guardian; then he becomes a guardian to his own sister, Hope. Henry Lockrose is a medical student in Boston in 1840 who can’t go home again and wouldn’t want to if he could, who falls in with occultists and lives beyond the ordinary span of years. Nimble is a mechanical ballerina invented by the occultist Athelstane for the protection of his daughter Millicent. Another character is Suni, a schoolboy with a stutter, who chases a kleptomaniac gremlin called Nabber into a dimension where all lost things are hoarded.

The writing is superb: spare, intelligent, twisty. An author’s photograph near the back reveals that Cameron Rogers resembles a dark elf version of Legolas. Under the pen-name Rowley Monkfish he writes children’s stories as well. – Chris Paige