Simon R. Green has more faces than the village gossip. We know he’s not Jim Butcher; in Drinking Midnight Wine we find that he’s neither Neil Gaiman nor Charles de Lint, though not for lack of trying. I will say this for Green; he has guts. This is a more ambitious book than the others of his that I’ve read, and if he doesn’t quite pull it off there are nevertheless some good bits. There are also some truly awkward moments, some wooden expository speeches, and the occasional failed bit of comic relief. But I enjoyed it anyway.

It seems that there are two worlds, side-by-wide: Veritie and Mysterie. Veritie is our world; Mysterie is its magical twin. Normal humans live in Veritie; Power and Dominations and folks with a touch of magic live in Mysterie. Some few have a foot in both worlds.

Toby Dexter is a bookstore clerk who follows a beautiful woman through a door that wasn’t there before and finds that the world is far stranger than he had realized; and it’s up to him to keep it that way. More or less.

I’ve read a number of Green’s books now, and a number of them have this same feeling of being just a little more than he can handle; though it would appear that he can handle more now than he used to. They also seem to be based on a reasonably consistent set of metaphysical assumptions, in that Green, like C.S. Lewis, distinguishes between the transcendent immaterial Creator of All That Is, i.e., God, and a variety of material or immaterial Gods who are incredibly powerful but can be slain. Most fantasy authors these days seem to stick with the latter and leave the former out.

Anyway, if you like the urban fantasy shtick, this is a fun little book, despite its flaws.