M. F. Bloxam’s novel, THE NIGHT BATTLES, tells the tale of an unlikable woman, Joan Severance, who goes to Sicily to research probate inventories of the 1500s.
She becomes involved with the archivist and with the small town of Valparuta. The story goes back and forth between her time in Valparuta, her growing up in Sicily, and the life she left behind Brown University.
This could have been a great book, but the writing is hit and miss.
On the positive side, I was unaware that there was actually a small cult of people in the 1500s who believed in the supernatural claims made by the Valparuta villagers in this book, and so this has led me to educate myself about that.
~Stephanie ( )

http://bactra.org/weblog/algae-2014-10.html#bloxam ( )

I really wanted to like The Night Battles. I mean, how often can you get a story featuring an academic, the mafia, and supernatural forces battling in an eons-long struggle?

Bloxam's prose is sensuously gorgeous, lingering over detailed descriptions. While it was easy at times to get lost in details, that wasn't always advantageous to moving the story along. More than once I found myself at the end of a page with no idea how I got there or what had happened.

I also appreciated Bloxam's attempt at keeping the more fantastical elements--mafia and supernatural battles--at some sort of remove. We see the evidence of these elements in action, but we don't get the blow-by-blow descriptions that might have sunk this novel into pulp genre fiction. However, the trouble is that trying so hard not to admit one is writing a mafia horror piece robs the novel of the power those elements bring. In the attempt to avoid overdoing the one, restraint was overdone.

As I said at the beginning, I wanted to like The Night Battles. It has a creative idea, and the author is clearly a skilled writer. But the self-conscious attempt to not do certain things created a distance between work and reader that kept me from entering wholeheartedly into the world of the story. ( )

Gripping, eerie, and suspenseful, this book grabbed me from the start and was hard to put down. I was on the edge of my seat and biting my nails. I really enjoyed this debut novel, and will definitely be picking up the next book by M.F. Bloxam. ( )

This was my first ARC from ER which I had asked for because I had enjoyed Guy Gavriel Kaye's use of the benendanti, the Night Walkers who fight the forces of evil for good crops, in his fantasy Tigana. I was largely disappointed because I was annoyed by the first person, present tense narration and by the sketchiness in the action. Ms. Bloxam can certainly turn a phrase, but overall I wished that she had put her manuscript through several more revisions. For readers who want atmosphere without much care in writing, this will be a good thriller. ( )