# Review: A Gathering of Storm Clouds, by C. Craig R. McNeil



## littlemissattitude (Dec 13, 2006)

It is the 1930s.  The sun never sets on the British Empire.  It isn’t yet clear exactly how much damage Hitler and his Nazis are capable of wreaking on Europe and the rest of the world.  And the Americans are sitting on the other side of the Atlantic, still an unknown quantity in world affairs.

But it isn’t the 1930s, exactly, that you and I learned about in our history books.  For one thing, King Edward isn’t about to abdicate his throne in order to marry the woman he loves, even though she is an American divorceé.  For another, the British have discovered the remains…and the technology…of lost Atlantis, putting it to work for them in new technologies of their own that will serve to cement their position as the rulers of a large portion of the world.

Or so they think.  A surprise attack in Glasgow at the dedication of a new battleship takes the lives of not only many subjects of the Empire but of the king himself.  It looks as if the attack came from the Germans.  A counterattack is prepared, carried out.  But it looks suddenly as if it were the Americans and not the Nazis who did the dastardly deed.  Or was it?  And where did whoever did launch the attack against the Empire get the technology to challenge the mighty dreadnoughts of the air and sea that the Empire believed were invincible?  Why was the attack launched in the first place, and what did the perpetrators intend to accomplish?  Or start?

These are the questions that drive the plot of _A Gathering of Storm Clouds_, by  C. Craig R. McNeil, a neat, compact alternate history/adventure novel that, while it borrows conceits from a variety of places, makes those ideas its own.  There is a dash of _Jurassic Park_ there, and a little bit of _The Island of Doctor Moreau_.  And in the theatre of my mind, the story took on much of the look of _Sky Captain and the World of Tomorrow_.  The dreadnoughts of the air reminded me a little of the wonderful airship in 1961’s _Master of the World_, while the submarine dreadnoughts echoed Jules Verne.  This is not to say that McNeil’s novel is derivative.  It isn’t, any more than any other novel, which will bring up associations and memories of other, much loved literature and films.

To be honest, I found that the story took a little while to really start moving, but once it did it really moved, going from one crisis to another, one mystery to another, one discovery to another at an efficient and effective pace.  It became impossible to put down, imperative to know what was going to happen next.  While the characters were stock characters to some extent: Captain John Riley, the steely-jawed special forces man; John Murdoch, the stiff-upper lip government operative; Jane Archer, the eminently qualified, no-nonsense archaeologist in a man’s world, they were still characters you could care about and root for.

If I have a real quibble with the novel, it has nothing to do with the story or the characters or the writing.  And it isn’t just a problem with this book; I have found it to be a general problem among self-published and small-press published books and even a growing problem among books out of the established publishing houses.  It is a pet peeve of mine, from the time I spent copy-editing a student newspaper, or I might not have noticed the problem at all.  The stumbling block for me was more technical, a seeming deficit in the proofreading and copy-editing.  There were a number of typos and other technical problems that would have been eliminated easily with the addition of a good, thorough copy-edit.  It is, in fact, a tribute to the ultimate strength of the story that I didn’t just throw the book across the room, as I often do with books that don’t seem to have had the benefit of a good copy editor.

So don’t, I repeat do not, let this quibble stop you from reading A Gathering of Storm Clouds.  It is a good effort from a good writer.  After all, how could anyone resist a book that contains this evocative passage:



> The superintendent was dead, a victim of his own arrogance.  He’d  refused to believe the Khadrae could jump all the way up to the first floor and had put his head out the window to see for himself.  There had been a short, startled scream almost like a squeal and then his headless body had fallen back into the room.


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## Foxbat (Dec 13, 2006)

Sounds interesting. I've had a bit of a penchant for alternate histories ever since I read PKD's _Man In The High Castle _so I might just give this one a whirl sometime. 

On the point about typos: I've found this quite a common problem in  self-published work. I think it's worth giving these books a bit more leeway than normal as the problem is probably more than not caused by sheer lack of resources.


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## Winters_Sorrow (Dec 13, 2006)

Sounds a bit daft in places and it's stereotypes seem more 1920s than 1930s but I do love a bit of Turtledove style alternative history so I may give it a whirl if I see it about.
Cheers LMA.


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## littlemissattitude (Dec 13, 2006)

And here I was ranting about typos and such, and I got the name of the city in which the attack on the dedication wrong.  Well, its fixed now.

I do agree with you, Foxbat, that self-published and small press books should get more slack about typos and the like than mainstream houses who, presumably, employ people to make sure that the errors are fixed.  I've never written a novel (yet), but I wrote some fairly lengthy papers when I was at university, and I know all too well the problem of trying to proofread and edit my own work after having lived with it for a period of time.  It's well-nigh impossible after awhile to forget what you think is on the page or what you intended to be there and see what is actually there and what needs to be fixed or re-thought.  I always tried to find someone else to read my work for errors, but there often wasn't anyone available and so I was on my own a lot of the time.

And on another note, I don't usually enjoy alternate history novels and don't often read them.  I did read _The Man in the High Castle_ and liked it, but I've never read Turtledove or any of the other genre writers.  Still, this novel really caught my imagination.


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## Foxbat (Dec 14, 2006)

littlemissattitude said:


> I do agree with you, Foxbat, that self-published and small press books should get more slack about typos and the like than mainstream houses who, presumably, employ people to make sure that the errors are fixed. I've never written a novel (yet), but I wrote some fairly lengthy papers when I was at university, and I know all too well the problem of trying to proofread and edit my own work after having lived with it for a period of time. It's well-nigh impossible after awhile to forget what you think is on the page or what you intended to be there and see what is actually there and what needs to be fixed or re-thought. I always tried to find someone else to read my work for errors, but there often wasn't anyone available and so I was on my own a lot of the time.


I've always found it a big help if you read it out aloud. It kind of helps you realise what is _actually _on the page rather than what you _think_ is there


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## littlemissattitude (Dec 14, 2006)

Foxbat said:


> I've always found it a big help if you read it out aloud. It kind of helps you realise what is _actually _on the page rather than what you _think_ is there



Agreed.  Because it is so easy to fool yourself into thinking you wrote what you meant to write, when in fact you didn't.  I don't know how many times I've caught some really silly error that would give someone exactly the opposite impression of what I was trying to say...sometimes I never noticed until the third or fourth time through, just reading silently.  And, yes, I've been known to proofread things I've written that many times.  I'm just the slightest bit obsessive-compulsive about my writing.   But those sorts of syntax and context problems, as well as punctuation problems, really jump out when you read aloud.


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## C. Craig R. McNeil (Dec 17, 2006)

Hi folks. A big thanks to LMA's great review. I notice a few of you were interested in buying A Gathering of Storm Clouds. I can provide a signed copy direct from myself for £6.99. If you want to take up my offer please let me know.

Craig


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