“Professor Orlando Delbrotman” was in flight from a deadly accident when an unexpected collision sent him careening off-course through space and time—only to land in London circa 1888. Luckily, the Professor did some human anthropology coursework that just happened to touch on Jack the Ripper. As he develops some gentle affection for the poor, benighted humans around him, the Professor struggles to protect them from the infamous murderer without dramatically changing the course of history.
Written by Shani Cossins, A GAME OF MASQUERADE has a fun premise: what if an alien from an advanced civilization were dropped into the Ripper investigation? Unfortunately, the text doesn’t live up to its promise; in fact, it elides much of what makes its concept interesting. How does the Professor already understand English, let alone a 19th-century Whitechapel dialect that would likely stymie a modern native English speaker? How does he immediately grasp peculiarities of gesture and comportment, reflecting complex sets of social values that are confusing and alien even to modern Britons? In one scene, he expresses disgust at an anti-Semitic utterance, but why should he care about ill-defined friction between two subsets of barbaric aliens from centuries in the past? Ellipses like these are a loss for the text and the reader. As it stands, the Professor basically just functions like a human being that happens to already know the history of the Ripper case, with one or two convenient “powers” (such as hypnotic suggestion). The Professor is also quite flat in purely narrative terms. It’s surprisingly difficult to answer basic questions, like what his motivations are: he seems worried about changing history, but there’s no sense that he should refrain from interacting with humans, nor any urgency for him to find his way back to his own time and place.
The text could get by on charm, but it still needs line-editing to improve the basic reading experience. Comma use is the most noticeable problem: commas are often missing (“‘come on let’s look somewhere else’”), including Oxford commas in lists (“The Professor’s senses swam with the smell of cheap liquor, heat and unwashed, reeking bodies”). At times, sentences mix too few commas with unnecessary ones: “He gave his best most earnest, pleading look and then scowled when he registered what life form, she had transformed into.” There are consistent issues with capitalization, especially around dialogue: either failing to capitalize the first word of a quotation or incorrectly capitalizing speech act verbs (said, yelled, etc.). When these errors cluster, they create real confusion as the reader struggles to follow a sentence. A GAME OF MASQUERADE has other unresolved issues that compound the confusion, including homophone substitutions like lightening/lightning, poured over/pored over, death throw/death throe, half passed six/half past six, and more.
The novel starts off with an energetic, imaginative conceit, but it’s too bogged down in structural and grammatical errors to let that conceit shine.
Shani Cossins’s A GAME OF MASQUERADE has a potentially fun premise, but flat storytelling and unresolved typos hamper its execution.
~ Dan Accardi for IndieReader