Mark Fitzpatrick's Unreal City

                                                        Art by Justine Gasquet, alias Melantropy on IG                                                         

A cover of a street lit by gaslamp, all shadow and eerie green light, invites one down a primrose path from which they may not escape. This is our first glimpse of the Unreal City. Framed within a Borgesian nesting device, this epistolary novel tells a tale of souls lost, souls found, and souls hanging in the balance against a backdrop of an alternate fin-de-siècle Paris. Chilling and surreal, this début novel by Mark Fitzpatrick will have its reader plunging into a world where nothing is quite what it seems and the multiple narrators all have something to lie about, if only to themselves. 

With degrees culminating in a doctorate from University College Cork, University of California Berkeley, Université de Paris III-Sorbonne Nouvelle, the author’s erudition riddles his story through with arcana delicious to those in the know, deftly avoiding the least hint of pedantry. In fact one laughs at an impish humor at the very moment chills run up the spine at the risk of eternal damnation that the characters are running. Esoteric, Aesthetic, Decadent and Bohemian, I give five stars out of five, without hesitation. 

I will be curious indeed to see more from Hidden Library, Bibliothèque Secrète, as this is the first volume that new publisher has come out with!

Publisher’s Blurb: “A lost manuscript from the pen of obscure Scots-Irish writer Martin Caulder, recently come to light. A pseudonymous work for the Olympia Press in Paris in the 1960s. A mysterious packet of papers from the 1920s. A Strange Case from the 1890s in fin de siècle Paris. William Crowe and Stephen Devlin, Irish exiles and students of the Occult, have made a dangerous wager, who shall be the first to woo young Thomas MacGilpatrick, a Jesuit novice, away from the Church and his vocation? The Path of Initiation into the Mysteries? Or the Path of Ecstasy and the Wild? Our two Devil's Advocates play a game of smoke and mirrors, Tarot-Chess, Kabbalistic Backgammon, working like artisans to win that single, tender, valuable soul. Through the dark streets and into the cabarets and crypts of a gaslit Night-town Paris, we are led a merry danse macabre, and stray with Doubtful Thomas through the labyrinth of that Unreal City. A chilling tale of decadence and delirium, to quicken even the deadest, darkest heart ...”