Clock's Watch Book Review
Clock’s Watch
by Michael Reyes, cover art by MV, interior art by Sean Bova, Jay Campbell, and MV
Mycelium Press (January 5, 2018)
I wasn’t sure what I was getting myself into here, as this was a sale that popped up on Twitter.
It turns out, I liked this collection of vignettes about Jerry Clock, the lone guardian of Coney Island against the demons and chthonic entities that attempt to enter the realms of men through it. To start, we don’t know much about Clock, other than that he wears a coonskin cap and no one can see him. Not just because he’s really short, a Little Person, but because there is something about him that most people just don’t notice anymore.
Which probably makes his job easier, since he can skulk around the boardwalk or get drunk on the beach without anyone asking impertinent questions like: why are you following that guy? or what are you doing with that crossbow and giant knife!?!
We see a fair bit of Jerry and his work through the eyes of the unfortunates who get caught up in the schemes of some unspeakable monster from the deep that needs a host to complete a summoning ritual, or some such. The details tend to vary here, since Clock’s Watch isn’t an exercise in elaborate world-building, but rather a pastiche of fantasy and horror and scifi villains that are consistently thwarted by a foul-mouthed dwarf who gets drunk and stabs things.
I’m a born Westerner, so I don’t know much about Coney Island or its environs, but I can detect the kind of passionate love of place that I enjoy in other authors’ work. So while I don’t know the place in the same way a local might, I could at least tell that Reyes wanted to tell fun stories set in a place he loved, even if [or because] it was a little weird.
This isn’t a book that takes itself too seriously, and was a lot of fun to read. I’m looking forward to volume II, and seeing what other kinds of trouble Clock finds himself in.
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