This is the second book in the Nightside series and I liked it quite a bit more than the first. The first book introduced us both to our first person narrator, John Taylor, private eye, and to his otherworldly home hidden within London the way Harry Potter's Diagon Alley is hidden from the mundane.
The Nightside "is a square mile of narrow streets and back alley in the centre of city linking slums and tenement that were old when the last century was new.... It's always three o' clock in the morning, and the dawn never comes." It's filled with demons, trolls, ghosts, giants, fairies, poltergeists, zombies, vampires, ghouls and talking horses. That was the strength of the first book, this phantasmagorical landscape.
In this one Taylor, with "Shotgun Suzy" at his side, has been hired to find "the Unholy Grail." The object, once drunk from by Judas Iscariot at the Last Supper, "magnifies all evil by its presence, encourages and accelerates evil trends and events, and utterly corrupts all who come in contact with it." Vying for ownership are those "agents of Light and Darkness." Angels. Angels from "above and below" who are fallen and unfallen. And even those angels from Heaven are not nice. They threaten to tear apart the Nightside to find the dark object.
It makes for an intriguing MacGuffin. And as with the first book the fun in this is Green's wild imagination loose in his depiction of his setting and characters, only here sharper, more immersive and less predictable than in the first book. It's also if anything more gross, gory and grisly in a very pulp fiction way. Fast-paced, enjoyable read.
