It's 1914. The Great War grips the world-and from the Western Front a strange story emerges...a story of St. George and a brigade of angels descending from heaven to fight beside the beleaguered British troops. But can there be any truth to it?
H. G. Wells, the most celebrated writer of his day-author of The Time Machine, The War of the Worlds, The Invisible Man -is dispatched to find out. There, he finds an eerie wasteland inhabited by the living, the dead, and those forever stranded somewhere in between...a no-man's-land whose unhappy souls trail him home to London, where a deadly plot, one that could turn the tide of war, is rapidly unfolding.
In league with his young love, the reporter and suffragette Rebecca West, Wells must do battle with diabolical forces-secret agents and depraved occultists-to save his sanity, his country, and ultimately the world.
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'Hold the line!' the Captain shouted. 'Hold the damned line'. PROLOGUE, MONS, BELGIUM, THE WESTERN FRONT, AUGUST 23 1914
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(47North, 1 October 2020, 393 pages, ebook, bought from @AmazonKindle #AmazonFirstReads)
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This is a bit of a disjointed book for me. I really enjoyed some aspects but other parts fell a little flat for ne. I was drawn to reading the book because of the word haunting in the title and the premise. I was expecting a sort of supernatural ghost story. That's not what I got. The book opens in dramatic fashion and I hoped this was an impression of things to come. Sadly, it wasn't. The actual haunting does not appear until much later in the book and is revealed not to be supernatural at all. Don't get me wrong, the secret plot is quite scary but just not what I expected it to be so I was disappointed. I knew very little about Well's life before I read the book so didn't know he constantly cheated on his wife. I had a real issue with this part of the book. It made me dislike Wells as a character and a person. I also felt great pity for his wife. I'm not a prude but I have little tolerance for affairs, lies and casual betrayals. His affair with Rebecca happened in real life but I don't see why this had to have such a big role in the book with Well's wife being shoe-horned to the side. It was distasteful. There is a lot of stuff I enjoyed though. I haven't read a lot of fiction set in the era of the book so this was illuminating. The author does a great job of bringing the era and real-life and fictional characters to life. I also enjoyed reading about Well's experiences at the front.
