The Stranger Times by C K McDonnell

Publisher – Penguin

Published – Out Now

Price – £8:99 paperback £5.99 Kindle eBook

There are dark forces at work in our world (and in Manchester in particular), so thank God The Stranger Times is on hand to report them . . .

A weekly newspaper dedicated to the weird and the wonderful (but mostly the weird), it is the go-to publication for the unexplained and inexplicable.

At least that's their pitch. The reality is rather less auspicious. Their editor is a drunken, foul-tempered and foul-mouthed husk of a man who thinks little of the publication he edits. His staff are a ragtag group of misfits. And as for the assistant editor . . . well, that job is a revolving door - and it has just revolved to reveal Hannah Willis, who's got problems of her own.

When tragedy strikes in her first week on the job The Stranger Times is forced to do some serious investigating. What they discover leads to a shocking realisation: some of the stories they'd previously dismissed as nonsense are in fact terrifyingly real. Soon they come face-to-face with darker forces than they could ever have imagined.

The start of a series is effectively the pilot episode. It introduces the characters, the dynamics and the set-up which is effectively in book form the world. It helps establish the tone the book is going for. Series will change over time (there is a reason very few Pratchett fans recommend starting the Discworld with The Colour of Magic) but from the reader perspective the key is can it hook you into one more book…then another. The Stranger Times by C K McDonnell is a new contemporary fantasy series trying to balance humour with drama and for me struggling to do either very well so far.

Hannah Willis has just escaped a very unhappy marriage and is rying to get her first ever job. It is not going well until she arrives for at a former church for a newspaper known as The Stranger Times where a team of unlikely and some would say chaotic individuals each week report on the strangest encounters in the world such as Nessie being drunk or a demonic toilet in a pub. It run by the drunk, untidy, foul-mouthed Vincent Banecroft a former Fleet Street editor now squirreled away in a backstreet of Manchester. Hannah more by luck gets the role of assistant editor just in time for a new series of strange events in Manchester striking very close to the Times itself. Mysterious and unlikely suicides are appearing; a strange american with unusual powers has arrived and the powers that be on all sides are unhappy if the Times finds out too much.

It sounds a good premise and McDonnell has constructed a good idea and the framework for a potentially good series. Its inventive and refreshing to see something not in London and there are scenes of genuine horror and also humour as the story develops. Rather than the traditional police or private eye we have a sub-Fortean Times style crew of misfits who already believe there are weird things which we soon find are actually real. The plot of a murder the team decide to investigate would likely have worked if it had been executed better.

There are a number of structural issues with this story. Starting off with Hannah she is our entry point into the land of the weird being a normal person thrust into the Stranger Times just because she needed a job. A classic way to get the reader to understand the world but she very much becomes a secondary character as does everyone else behind the figure of Banecroft. This character ends up very much taking every scene they are in. Imagine a mix of DR House and Gene Hunt but this time behind a paper. Sarcastic, rude, unsociable, and drunk yet also intelligent, perceptive and perhaps has own reasons to be doing this role he soon takes over centre stage. You would imagine if a TV show was made many character actors would love this...but….it runs out of steam very quickly.

Such ogres work if the rest of the cast have at least some counterbalance and the cast including Hannah are rather weakly portrayed. Hardly memorable and they just do things that move story along. Banecroft is usually right, can stand up to anyone, and they end up following his orders. He doesn’t in this story evolve and by the end he is more tiresome rather than entrancing. McDonnell loves this character a little too much and so for the first novel in a series fleshing out the wider cast more would have been a smarter move. There isn’t with this character much room for anyone else to breathe in the story.

The other issue I had was the use of racism. One character is Asian and Banecroft tends to refer to him as ‘The Chinese one’ but while one character pulls him up there are no consequences later on this behaviour. The scene I reacted though most strongly against was a bar fight where the same character gets a racial slur from a thug used against him. A particularly unpleasant one which the character proves their own violence will beat…but…did that scene need to be done in that way it almost felt more like it was a comedic pay off which I didn’t at all find funny. This book is not about racism and the character in question has very little to do in the wider plot and this isn’t really used later to any great effect. It felt almost like let’s have a provocative scene and have our cake by eating it to show the non-white character is his own person. In the 2020s should we still have random racist terms used in books by white authors without any real gripping of the issues even when they are very badly trying to handle racism in a single scene. It felt a clumsy piece of well-meaning representation that I would have expected 10-15 years ago not now and I’m surprised the editing process did not question it. McDonnell has created a diverse cast and it’s a shame that as everything is hogged by Banecroft that this diversity feels so thinly developed compared to what other fantasy novels are doing this decade.

The Stranger Times has a good idea at its heart, and it could with a few simple changes develop into something really fresh and unusual. but this debut fantasy novel is trying to do a juggling act while tying its shoelaces together and the result for me doesn’t work very well. There is a talented author here, but I cannot currently recommend this. I have the second novel to read for an ARC so will be interested to see if this quickly improves or else this series will be for me very much yesterday’s news.