Genre: Romance, Alt History
LGBTQ+ Category: Gay
Reviewer: Ulysses
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About The Book
In an alternate Gilded Age where Queen Victoria’s empire rebuilt America in gaslight and gears, Artesian rose as the world’s most beautiful city – and it’s most dangerous.
Everyone here participates in the game: for power, for survival.
When a grieving young man becomes the obsession of the city’s most notorious criminal, this steampunk reimagining of The Phantom of the Opera asks: what happens when everyone wears a mask?
In Artesian, love isn’t just forbidden.
It’s fatal.
The Review
A fascinating and lushly written book, “The Masquerade” was frustrating to me only in that it is just the first instalment (Act 1) of a series. I’m hooked already.
I started in on this without reading any advance notice about it, so it took me a while to latch onto the core surprise of the narrative. The story begins with a celebrated young opera singer, Christian Daae, blind since his youth, who has just lost his father and accompaniest, a celebrated violinist. Christian is returning his father’s body to America for burial.
But this is not an America I know; it has been transformed back into a colonial outpost of the British Empire. Weakened and divided by the Civil War, a very pro-active Queen Victoria invaded the North from Canada, and the South from the West, arming and unleashing freed slaves and betrayed Indigenous people on the American military. The War of Reclamation has triggered the creation of a steampunk Gilded Age in an ethnically diverse and technologically advanced new country, parceled out among Europe’s monarchies. Its walled capital city is Artesian, a phoenix from the ashes of war in which the inventor, the artist, and the capitalist rule in shadowed collusion.
The hidden puppet-master of the city is Erik, a talented singer, but also secretive and fire-damaged. Erik pulls the strings of creativity and capitalism from his secret lair far below the surface. Erik always wears a mask, and indeed all the people of Artesian wear masks in public. The mask has become part of Artesian culture, which has given it a legendary—and sinister—reputation across Victoria’s polyglot empire. It was the moment when Erik thinks of his local nickname, Opera Ghost, that I finally realized that F.E. Feeley has created a reimagined “Phantom of the Opera,” in a much larger and more complicated cultural context. As the story opens, Erik has been charged with designing a purpose-built opera house to be constructed in the heart of Artesian, intended to outshine the new Garnier opera in Paris.
The blind singer Christian has not been back in America since his childhood. His immediate protector and mentor in Artesian is Fiona, a violinist and close friend of his late father’s. His blindness emblematic of his innocence, Christian is the only person in Artesian who appears in public unmasked. His beauty and his brilliant blue, unseeing eyes, make him an instant sensation in this city where everything is seen and judged and where social power is second only to financial clout.
Immediately on Christian’s return to Artesian, he comes to the attention of the scheming Erik. Soon after, Raoul de Chagny, a French aristocrat who has fallen under Christian’s spell in Europe, arrives by airship to the reclaimed American colonies. As Christian Daae grieves the loss of his beloved parent, the hidden wheels of Artesian begin to turn.
Five stars.
The Reviewer
Ulysses Grant Dietz grew up in Syracuse, New York, where his Leave It to Beaver life was enlivened by his fascination with vampires, from Bela Lugosi to Barnabas Collins. He studied French at Yale, and was trained to be a museum curator at the University of Delaware. A curator since 1980, Ulysses has never stopped writing fiction for the sheer pleasure of it. He created the character of Desmond Beckwith in 1988 as his personal response to Anne Rice’s landmark novels. Alyson Books released his first novel, Desmond, in 1998. Vampire in Suburbia, the sequel to Desmond, is his second novel.
Ulysses lives in suburban New Jersey with his husband of over 41 years and their two almost-grown children.
By the way, the name Ulysses was not his parents’ idea of a joke: he is a great-great grandson of Ulysses S. Grant, and his mother was the President’s last living great-grandchild. Every year on April 27 he gives a speech at Grant’s Tomb in New York City.