The Platinum Raven and other novellas

Rohan's latest book is a riveting read. The novella "The Host in the Attic" in particular is splendidly Wildean: in it, his novel "The Imagination Thief" itself drives forward the plot of "The Host in the Attic". He is a veritable Imagination Thief!

This series of novellas are all well crafted and designed to draw the reader in to the shifting realities of their settings. The title novella Platinum Raven in fact has two young women in the two narratives one the Chocolate Raven in a vividly evoked Dubai and the Platimum Raven in the Shard in London- also very vividly described. There are elements of magical realism and alternate reality throughout At times the two Ravens appear to communicate but the levels of reality are enigmatic and intiguing . The Host in the Attic is a beautifully reinterpreted version of The Portrait of Dorian Gray set in a high tec dystopian world and a sinister computer global company- Mainframe Corporation which appears to permeate every level of society. The hologram corporate image logo is in essence Dorian . All the main characters from Wilde's novel are here in more modern form. It has a tremendous and horrific climax. The horror novella Apricot Eyes is a fast paced horror tale in a nightmarish New York. Hallucination in Hong Kong is a mysterious tale of past and present , dreams and waking with horror and love themes. The whole collection is a roller coaster of at times nightmarish perceptions and strange surreal happenings brilliantly imagined. The tales leave a lasting impression and I recommend highly .

You know how it feels when you come out of a really good comedy night and think you're funnier than you actually are, but no one else is laughing? Then you'll understand why I am to trying to resist the temptation to be clever with words. I would also be doing the author a dis-service. Because, although Rohan Quine is a master of words, his world is also accessible, and it's a place you definately need to visit. With echoes of Jennifer Egan's Good Squad, Quine captures all that is beautiful, but he doesn't shy away from all that is ugly. What links the four novellas together is that his characters are all searching for that something beyond the everyday, beyond the ordinary, and Quine is a god, having them dole out kindness and justice. In his world, everything that is commonplace would be anialated. This is the kind of read you have to give yourself up to. It worked far better for me once I stopped trying to analyse what the author was trying to do and to second-guess where we were going next. (Are all of the characters in The Platinum Raven figments of each other's imagination? for example. Are we in the future? Oh wait, Jon Snow is still reading the news...) When you emerge on the other side with a greater understanding of what it means to be 'that animal called human,' then that will be the time to stop and ask, 'What just happenned?'

From the stasis of her daily life, Raven multiplies herself upwards into two heightened versions of herself -- first, a flatly glamorised “Chocolate” version, and then a transcendent “Platinum” version. Through this self-transcendence, Quine is illuminating the self-determinations that many of us make whenever we curate our own images for public consumption. As such, the apparently fairytale-like “The Platinum Raven” attains a mythic expression of what all our own personas and archetypes are driven by. “The Host ion the Attic” is a brand-new take on Wilde’s iconic story -- a truly original reversioning that resonates with such elements of our contemporary world as the Dark Web, excessive mass-media saturation and unhealthy kinds of fame. I was enticed by the extreme creepiness of its interior settings and thrilled by my escalating apprehension at what new horror would greet my nerve-ends as soon as I was again pulled up that ladder and into the attic. Throughout a nocturnal New York City, unseen charges of emotion and ambition flicker, in “Apricot Eyes”. Quine’s verbal sensuality combines the disturbing and the alluring in equal measure. Drawn into the danger of it, I was seduced by the dark “elfishness” of this story and its characters, who pranced their way into my New York dreamscape like mischievous guests. In its dramatically intense focus upon monstrous possible events that never quite happen, “Hallucination in Hong Kong” has the kind of unsettling effect that I expect will be seen through those near-future Mixed Reality glasses that will soon be available to us. There’s a kaleidoscope quality to its shifting depictions and exhanges between romance and horror, which makes it stick in the mind long after one’s finished reading.