Book Review: Midnight is a Place
Jul. 8th, 2025 08:34 amOnward in the Aikening! This time ![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png)
littlerhymes and I read Midnight is a Place, which is very loosely related to the Wolves series in that it also features an industrial city named Blastburn. There are no crossover characters, no wolves, no reigning Tudor-Stuarts, and the town has completely different industries. Aiken may have just liked the name Blastburn.
However, I’m glad that it is described as related to the Wolves books, as otherwise we wouldn’t have read it and this book is PEAK gothic. Start with Midnight Court, an old house which is falling into ruin because the crabbed and miserly owner has been selling off the furniture and firing all the servants! Add a lonely orphan boy and his Mysterious Tutor! Throw in a Dickensian carpet factory where the carpet-making process ends with a press that can and will squash children on a regular basis! Stir in one more lonely orphan, this one a small and furious girl from France, and you have yourself a rich and savory gothic stew.
This is merely the set-up. Other gothic elements arrive in due course. For instance: the current owner of Midnight Court won it in a midnight bet at the Hellfire Club! (Not actually called the Hellfire Club, but the same idea.) The lonely orphan boy must make his living by descending into the sewers to find treasure. (The sewers are inhabited by savage rats and thirty to forty feral hogs, because Aiken loves a wild animal attack.) The child-squashing press on the mantelpiece does of course go off.
Overall a delight. The only flaw is that the last chapter is pretty rushed, and introduces a completely random plot thread for two pages which is then summarily dropped. ( Spoilers for the random plot thread ) But you can just kind of ignore that bit and savor all the gothic everything that precedes it.
littlerhymes and I read Midnight is a Place, which is very loosely related to the Wolves series in that it also features an industrial city named Blastburn. There are no crossover characters, no wolves, no reigning Tudor-Stuarts, and the town has completely different industries. Aiken may have just liked the name Blastburn. However, I’m glad that it is described as related to the Wolves books, as otherwise we wouldn’t have read it and this book is PEAK gothic. Start with Midnight Court, an old house which is falling into ruin because the crabbed and miserly owner has been selling off the furniture and firing all the servants! Add a lonely orphan boy and his Mysterious Tutor! Throw in a Dickensian carpet factory where the carpet-making process ends with a press that can and will squash children on a regular basis! Stir in one more lonely orphan, this one a small and furious girl from France, and you have yourself a rich and savory gothic stew.
This is merely the set-up. Other gothic elements arrive in due course. For instance: the current owner of Midnight Court won it in a midnight bet at the Hellfire Club! (Not actually called the Hellfire Club, but the same idea.) The lonely orphan boy must make his living by descending into the sewers to find treasure. (The sewers are inhabited by savage rats and thirty to forty feral hogs, because Aiken loves a wild animal attack.) The child-squashing press on the mantelpiece does of course go off.
Overall a delight. The only flaw is that the last chapter is pretty rushed, and introduces a completely random plot thread for two pages which is then summarily dropped. ( Spoilers for the random plot thread ) But you can just kind of ignore that bit and savor all the gothic everything that precedes it.
