I was kindly given an ARC of 'Stolen Pallor' by its publishers a year ago but it wasn't out then and I hadn't realised that it eventually came out in July. So I'm a little late with this review, but I'm very happy that I dived in now.

It's a novella that doesn't quite reach the hundred page mark, but it does a lot within the space it has; appropriately so for a story so fundamentally about the meaning of art. It starts tantalisingly with a glorious prologue, the unveiling of a new painting, 'Gone by Morning', that radiates light to burn the building to the ground, killing everyone within except Cole. Oddly, this prologue is told in stream of consciousness italics, which are rather annoying, but we promptly jump forward twenty years into more traditional storytelling, so it's not a huge deal.

Cole is now some sort of detective, assisted occasionally by his lover, Mikey, who's psychic and can extract dreams out of the heads of others. That's what he wants to happen to him, because, even a couple of decades on, he's still having nightmares about 'Gone by Morning', an incident that took his father from him. However, while Mikey seems to be reliable, he only succeeds in dragging that dream out so far as to become waking hallucinations, which become powerful flavour for the book. After all, it's about art, what art means and how it affects us and how everything in the city of New Florence is art, whether it's in a gallery or not.

This is too short a book to explain exactly what Cole does as a detective, but he's quickly brought in by the most important man in the city, Amistead Dimwitter, chairman of the Gallery Directorate. Dimwitter's problem is that three people have fallen prey to a bizarre affliction in which they find themselves so captivated by a painting that they stare at it unceasingly for hours. When security takes them out on gurneys, they start to react, thrashing around as if in horror that they're being parted from the art. And a fourth is in the West Gallery right now, Susan Wells.

Cole can't get a response out of her but he can wait all night until she's ready to leave, which she does in robotic fashion. He follows her but not to where he expects. She walks through a glimmer to Midnight Village, a carnival mirror image city existing parallel to New Florence that's cleverly described as a physical darkweb. Of course, it's an inherently dangerous place, accessible only to those with something extra or those sponsored by such. Cole can only get in with Mikey acting as his passport, which saves him from the guardian wraiths in the nick of time. Also, Midnight Village was founded and is run by Fangsy, who's a vampire artist.

As I mentioned earlier, there's a lot here. Cole's initial descent into Midnight Village is haunting, reminding not only of 'The City & The City' but also 'The City', meaning both China Miéville and S. C. Mendes. If it was quirkier, I'd call out 'Neverwhere' too, but Neil Gaiman, ironically, given recent news, was never this dark in his fiction. He wove his fairy tales out of dreams. Eads and Viola work with nightmares that lurk just beyond us in a sprawl of creativity and, however much they write in genres like dark fantasy or weird fiction, this is fundamentally grounded in horror.

I liked the idea of New Florence, a hundred and seventy-five-years-old and almost literally built on art. The founders were artists. There are three hundred galleries dotted around the city and the citizens all draw, paint or sculpt as readily as they breathe. That's why the Gallery Directorate is a supremely powerful organization; its collation of the directors of the thirty largest galleries more powerful than any elected politician. It sees art as life and that's why it's not only in the galleries but in the streets and in the architecture.

I liked Midnight Village even more, because it's the same but on the flipside. The art isn't vibrant and colourful and alive. It's dark and twisted and horrific but just as omnipresent. Maybe that's a primary reason why 'The City' keeps coming back to me as the most obvious comparison, notably so given that it was also published by Bloodbound Books and written by one of its founders. What Mendes gave us in the City was secretive but enticing, as if it wants people to go there but not to leave.

Midnight Village feels the same way. Fangsy certainly has no problem with people knowing where the glimmer is and walking through it, but he doesn't seem to want them to leave because they'll serve as physical material for new art. There are a bunch of obvious equivalents, but it's far more common for those other places to want to stay secret, as deliberately isolated communities or the sort of hidden worlds never meant to be found. I'm thinking 'Neverwhere' but also Midian in Clive Barker's 'Cabal'/'Nightbreed' and especially wherever Richard Upton Pickman finds his models in the Boston of H. P. Lovecraft's 'Pickman's Model', another horrific piece of art built around other horrific pieces of art.

Most of all, I liked this novella. I haven't read anything by either author before, so have no idea if this would feel more like Sean Eads to his fans or Joshua Viola to his. However, they divvied up the work, it felt agreeably weird and dark and meaningful. I felt this novella and not only because I've personally spent twenty minutes falling into a painting, in my case 'That Which I Should Have Done I Did Not Do' by Ivan Albright, which hangs in the Art Institute of Chicago. It's merely a painting of a door, but it's the sort of door that might exist in Midnight Village, warped and diseased and in a state of mourning. The right piece of art can capture us and Eads and Viola nail that feeling here. I'll happily seek out more of their work. ~~ Hal C F Astell