THE STONE OF DESTINY

Andrew Neil MacLeod

(Burning Chair, £9.99)

 

No doubt inspired by the realisation that Dr Johnson and James Boswell would fall naturally into a Holmes/Watson dynamic, Andrew Neil MacLeod reimagined the duo as occult detectives in last year’s The Fall of the House of Thomas Weir, which saw them investigating paranormal occurrences in 18th Century Edinburgh. It was a conceit as entertaining as it was audacious, portraying Johnson, the celebrated man of letters, pitting his considerable wits against a supernatural foe that remained, despite his best efforts, beyond rational explanation.

If MacLeod was dipping his toe in the water with that book, sequel The Stone of Destiny is a full immersion, cramming in so many cliffhangers, ancient artefacts and cryptic texts that it resembles nothing so much as Indiana Jones scripted by Dan Brown – if Dan Brown were also committed to covering as many sub-genres of horror in one story as humanly possible.

It’s 1773, and Johnson has turned up once more in Edinburgh to see his close friend Boswell, this time with the aim of determining whether the Stone of Destiny, on which British monarchs are crowned, is the real thing or a cunning fake. Concocting a cover story that they’re touring around Scotland’s Neolithic sites, they head for Scone, the first stop in a perilous quest to uncover the truth. Conceived as a “road novel”, this episodic book also brings to mind classic portmanteau horror films, the quest for the Stone serving as the linking material for a series of separate adventures from Scone to St Kilda, on which they are shadowed by hooded men on horseback.

It quickly becomes apparent to our heroes (and Boswell’s faithful Bohemian servant, Joseph) that they’ve left behind the cosy certainties of their old lives and entered a realm where dark magic, perverted science and sheer terror lurk around every corner. The real-life Johnson and Boswell did indeed pay a call on Lord Monboddo in 1773, but we can be sure it was nothing like this: a full-on grand guignol plunge into Island of Dr Moreau territory, with fantastical hybrid creatures as pawns in a deadly scheme. Barely have the duo escaped with their lives, and deciphered a few lines of the vellum book they found stashed inside the Fortingall Yew, when they discover that the mansion they’re now staying in has a werewolf problem. They get caught up in a witch-hunt too, beginning a folk-horror sequence that culminates on St Kilda with a pagan cult leader and some potent mushrooms.

Unless you want to throw in a vampire for good measure, all that’s missing from the mix is the cosmic weirdness of ancient other-dimensional beings, and MacLeod does that too, paying off the mythical themes set up at the beginning in a climax so metaphysically spacey that he’ll find it hard to top in any future instalments.

Johnson and Boswell are a plucky and amiable pair of adventurers, and, even if Johnson’s expertise in a vast range of arcane disciplines means that solutions come to him a little too easily, the relentless pace and constant danger does begin to wear them down, Johnson becoming hampered by a “deadly torpor” and expressing fears for his sanity while Boswell grows melancholic and starts having nightmares and reaching for the bottle rather too often.

It’s a solidly written compendium of horror tropes that doesn’t let up for an instant, skipping energetically from one vignette to the next, and MacLeod’s well-crafted prose – fluent, quietly stylish, evoking just enough period flavour without drawing attention to itself – deserves credit for keeping it ticking over nicely.

ALASTAIR MABBOTT