War in Heaven Book

"The telephone bell was ringing wildly, but without result, since there was no-one in the room but the corpse." Hell of a way to start a book.

An extraordinary occult thriller set at first in a London publishing house run by the two kinds of publisher (1: flaccid dweeb publishing trashy novels for money; 2: evil incarnate). The publishing stuff is genuinely hilarious, but we soon discover via a late amendment to page proofs that the Holy Grail (here Graal) has been found in a small English village, and off we go. Heroes are the Archdeacon of the parish, a publisher's clerk (marketing), and a duke with a sideline in poetry. It is impossible not to enjoy this book.

Villains are the evil publisher, a particularly shitty author (see?) and a couple of sinister foreigners. The latter two are rather from central casting but although one is IDd as Jewish I didn't get the usual whiff of antisemitism here: he was an individual, albeit not a particularly individualised one. As an occult thriller to do with the Grail this is obviously heavily pegged around religion, but it's extremely Anglican, which is to say very few of the MCs believe in God as such, and the Archdeacon is embarrassed by displays of religion,and, refreshingly, thinks the Grail is a trivial object that isn't worth human suffering. The general sense is very much *not* the sweaty "you must find devotion and convert" mood of the crappier occult thriller, and yes I read too many of these.

Most of all the villains are not stock Satanists who are on the evil side to provide an antagonist. The evil publisher is, in fact a malignant narcissist, a manipulative abuser whose pleasure in controlling and hurting others is the thing that leads him to evil magic, rather than vice versa. The shitty author is a hugely selfish mannerless brute with no care for others. They are terrible people before they are anything in the way of occult, and this really make the book zing. There's a fantastic scene where one of the baddies is in trouble and asks his partner in crime for help, and is impatiently told "You're not interesting enough to run any risks for." Oh.

And the best bit is, we get the villain POVs and with that a sense of their impending doom. The villains generally have the upper hand, and the good guys are not by any means safe at any point, but by far the two scariest parts of the book are moments when the bad guys have a sense of their eternal fate - the one in a shabby shop with a door that won't ever open, the other given a comparison of himself to an ant inside the chalice's smooth interior, scrabbling, unable to get out. It's cosmic and metaphysical horror but the sense is powerful.

This is very metaphysical all told (it's by one of CS Lewis and JRR Tolkien's writing group) and it goes into the mythological at points with the Grail-protector who is genuinely quite scary-nasty on the side of good. A fascinating read which kept me thoroughly hooked.