This sequel to The Glass Books of the Dream Eaters, which I so loved, picks up immediately after the close of Glass Books and follows the same alternating chapter structure. Miss Temple wakes from a fever to find herself seemingly deserted by Chang and Doctor Svenson and the villagers sheltering her rather urgently wanting her gone. Mysterious deaths abound as she makes her way back to London, struggling with the changes that reading a glass book have wrought on her.

We switch to Chang and then to Svenson, moving back in time to see why each of them in turn felt obliged to leave and developing the new plot which involves a second tier of conspirators who are moving into the power vacuum left by the destruction of the original cabal.

There a couple of problems with this sequel which make it somewhat less enjoyable than Glass Books. Firstly, the ending of that first book left our three heroes stranded far away from the centre of the action. Therefore the first part of the book has to be devoted to getting them back to where the conspiracy is taking place. Dahlquist does his best to raise mysteries to keep the reader involved, and to a certain extent that works – except the back cover blurb gives it all away (tip: do not read the back cover blurb for this book). Also, it never does become entirely clear what exactly has happened in the smaller details. I can guess, but unlike the first book, guesses are never properly confirmed.

Because of the time spent moving the characters into position, there is less time to introduce the new swathe of villains. One of the pleasures of Glass Books is that it never moves slowly but because all three heroes encounter the villains individually, they are introduced three times over: the reader has the space to see where alliances and motivations lie. However, with The Dark Volume, villains are switching sides and plans before you’ve even had time to work out whose side they’re currently on or what they were intending to do. It’s much, much harder to keep the intricate backstabbings straight.

And lastly, the Process and its related elements have moved from being enticingly mysterious to annoyingly vague. Turns out indigo clay, which is used to make the blue glass, can do just about anything, from brainwashing and mind control to powering airships, and lord knows what the Process actually does…I’m coming at the book from a fantasy perspective, so it doesn’t bother me too much. Someone reading with a SF perspective would probably be put off by the imprecision.

All this is not to say I didn’t very much enjoy seeing these characters in action again, and watching their relationships evolve. In fact, the main disappointment to me was that they spend even less time together in this one than they did in Glass Books. Once again I’m hoping for a sequel, because if it’s left where The Dark Volume ended, our heroes are in a bad, bad place indeed.

The first chapter of this book was published as a stand-alone short story in the New Yorker…and the first chapter is beautiful. It is a character sketch of a city and a few of its inhabitants. The city holds the dead; the people in it have crossed over in various ways: across a desert, through a forest, into an ocean. They all end up in the ever-expanding city.

They are those who are still remembered by the living, who still have a life of sorts in the memories of the people still alive. After an indeterminate amount of time, they disappear from the city, as the last person who personally remembers them dies. It’s a lovely set-up.

Various hints lead us to understand that the book is set in a near-future world of wars and terrorist attacks, and indeed the opening chapter ends with the city of the dead emptying out like a leaking bucket: the living are dying so rapidly that much of the population of the city of the dead are no longer remembered and so are disappearing.

Cut to the living world, where Laura Byrd is alone and forgotten in the Antarctic. Her hut is running out of heat, and she must trek across the ice to the larger shelter of a penguin research station, where she hopes to find a working radio and make contact with her employers, Coca Cola. The two worlds are interspersed chapter by chapter.

It’s well-told, it’s well-imagined – questions of how the city of the dead actually works (do they have to earn money to eat? Who stocks the supermarket?) are never answered, but much is implied. For example, one man is hassled by beggars, as he was in life – because he is unpleasant and so does not deserve the pleasant afterlife everyone else seems to be having? Because he has a guilty secret? Because he expects it?

But there’s something lacking in the story. I think Brockmeier wrote himself into a corner. Laura is the last person left alive in the entire world, and stuck in the world’s most hostile environment. There’s nowhere to go from there but where it does go; it’s just a question of how and when. The book, the character sketches of various people waiting in the city, is just a way of eking out the pages; lovely to read, interesting to think about, but in the end, pointless. There’s no hope left here and I’m not sure any story can be anything but lacking when there’s no hope.