Just Another Judgement Day

Just Another Judgement Day is the ninth volume of Simon R. Green's Nightside sequence, published in hardback by Ace in January 2009, and a useful demonstration of why long-running urban fantasy series end up the way they do. Green has been writing the Nightside since 2003. He produces these books at roughly one a year. He knows exactly what they are. The reader who has come this far knows exactly what they are. The book is therefore in the slightly awkward position of needing to deliver the established pleasures without making the long-term reader feel they have already read it, and to do both while introducing whichever new high-concept antagonist this volume is going to throw at John Taylor.

For the uninitiated, the Nightside is a secret quarter of London where the clocks have stopped at three in the morning and the dawn has never come. Every monster of every mythology lives here. Every god of every pantheon has a back office here somewhere. The streets are full of bars and clubs and bargains that no rational person should accept and of the supernatural rich indulging themselves in things that do not bear describing. The Nightside is policed in a manner of speaking by the Authorities, the latest group of power brokers to take charge of the place, and unofficially patrolled by Walker, the Nightside's chief enforcer and a man whose word is, in most situations, sufficient. The protagonist, John Taylor, is a private investigator with the unusual gift of being able to find anything in the Nightside if you can describe it. He is also, although the books take their time admitting it directly, an extremely dangerous man with a parentage he would rather not discuss.

The high concept this time is the Walking Man, who arrives in the Nightside under his own apocalyptic header. The Walking Man is God's own enforcer, a being whose sole stated purpose is the elimination of the wicked and the guilty, and who, by reputation, cannot be killed. He has come to the Nightside, which on its own terms is the most efficient place on the planet to find the wicked and the guilty. The Authorities, who do not particularly enjoy the prospect of their constituency being thinned to extinction, hire Taylor to stop him. Magic does not work on the Walking Man. Science does not work on him. Trying to talk him out of it does not work either, because he believes he is right and has, on the available evidence, considerable theological cover for the belief.

The book works for the first two-thirds. Green's prose is at its best when describing the Nightside in passing, in the lists and asides that have become the series' signature style, the dark crowds and the impossible bars and the small horrors of street furniture that has opinions about who walks past it. The Walking Man's first appearances are effective: he simply arrives, identifies the most arrogant evildoer in the room, and the room becomes considerably emptier in the space of a paragraph. Green is very good at conveying the unfussy mechanical menace of a force that cannot be reasoned with. The chapters in which Taylor and his newly introduced ally Chandra Singh are stalking the Walking Man across the Nightside while bracing for what happens when he stalks them back are among the better set pieces in the series so far.

What works less well is the resolution. The trick of revealing the Walking Man's actual motivation, which turns out to be considerably more personal and human than the divine-enforcer billing suggests, is the kind of move Green has made before in this series, and which the long-term reader will see coming a couple of chapters before it lands. The other long-running Green move, which is to introduce a flotilla of vividly described supporting characters specifically so they can be killed in short order to demonstrate that the antagonist is serious, is on full display here, and by the ninth book the device is visible. The cleverer surprise is that the Walking Man has never previously been mentioned in the series, despite the apparent significance of his role in the cosmology, and arrives as a piece of mythology bolted on rather than uncovered. Within Green's mode this is forgivable. The Nightside is the kind of place where cosmologically significant beings turn up in chapter one and are gone by chapter twenty regardless of how foundational they ought to be. It is still a slight cheat.

What the book does substantially well, and what will probably matter most to long-term readers, is move the character relationships forward. The slow, careful, badly damaged relationship between John Taylor and Suzie Shooter, the borderline-sociopathic gun-for-hire he is in love with and who is in love with him, gets some of its most affecting writing here. The book opens up rather more of the long-running Walker question, the matter of why exactly the Nightside's chief enforcer has spent nine books being both Taylor's antagonist and his off-and-on protector. And the establishment of the Authorities as a more or less stable governing body for the Nightside, rather than the chaotic interregnum of recent books, signals that Green is positioning the series for a longer arc than he had previously implied.

This is not the best Nightside book the series has produced, and it is not trying to be. It is a solid mid-cycle entry that delivers what the series exists to deliver, which is fast, ridiculous, oddly affecting urban fantasy with a body count and a sense of humour. Just Another Judgement Day is the ninth course of a meal you either ordered for the right reasons or are wondering why you ordered. If you are still reading the series at book nine, you already know which of those you are, and the book will neither convert you to the other nor disappoint you out of your existing position. That, in long-running urban fantasy terms, is success.