Review: The Shadow Glass by Josh Winning

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MY ⭐️ RATING: 4.25/5

Format: Kindle Whispersync

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BOOK DESCRIPTION

Josh Winning’s debut horror-fantasy, The Shadow Glass is Dark Crystal meets About a Boy in London, a race against the clock to stop bloodthirsty puppets from taking over the world.

Jack Corman is failing at life. Jobless, jaded, and on the “wrong” side of 30, he’s facing the threat of eviction from his London flat while reeling from the sudden death of his father, onetime film director Bob Corman. Back in the ’80s, Bob poured his heart and soul into the creation of his 1986 puppet fantasy The Shadow Glass, a film Jack loved as a child, idolizing its fox-like hero Dune. But The Shadow Glass flopped on release, deemed too scary for kids and too weird for adults, and Bob became a laughing stock, losing himself to booze and self-pity. Now, the film represents everything Jack hated about his father, and he lives with the fear that he’ll end up a failure just like him.

In the wake of Bob’s death, Jack returns to his decaying home, a place creaking with movie memorabilia and painful memories. Then, during a freak thunderstorm, the puppets in the attic start talking. Tipped into a desperate real-world quest to save London from the more nefarious of his father’s creations, Jack teams up with excitable fanboy Toby and spiky studio executive Amelia to navigate the labyrinth of his father’s legacy while conjuring the hero within – and igniting a Shadow Glass resurgence that could, finally, do his father proud.

In The Shadow Glass, Josh has created a genre-bending adventure infused with the nostalgia and horror of Stranger Things that will appeal to the ’80s kid in everyone. Both subverting fantasy tropes and paying homage to them, Jack answers the question, what happens when Bastian from The Never Ending Story grows up? Probably a lot of therapy. At once laugh-out-loud funny and taking a candid look at the complex nature of grief, the listener will root for Jack to defeat his demons, both literally and figuratively.

MY REVIEW

The Shadow Glass is unique and very different from anything else I’ve read, it’s a bit dark but exciting and very 80’s nostalgic. When I saw that this was described as a love letter to 80’s fantasy films such as The Labyrinth and The Never Ending Story, I was all in on this story. Growing up during that era myself, seeing stories like those being inspiration for something, wasn’t something I ever expected to see. While Ernest Cline has focused on the 80’s himself, with Ready Player One, he was more on the video/arcade game part of the 80’s. So I loved that Winning decided to write a story that used more nostalgia from my childhood to tell something fun and different. It made me go back and watch all of those movies that got named dropped in the novel, and showed just how much I missed being a kid.

With so many name drops of classic 80’s movies, I know the author was a huge fan of that time. The comparison I came up with while reading this was that it was more of a Labyrinth meets Gremlins, and I’ll explain. Labyrinth, Dark Crystal, Never Ending Story and most 80’s fantasy films are stories that transport the reader to a different world, while The Shadow Glass does the opposite, and transports the fantastical elements, to the real world. Movies like Gremlins, Critters and even The Puppet Master are better examples of this, and even fits a little more with the seriousness of the bad puppets.

“What is a hero but a normal person overcoming their own failings to defeat the demons of their soul?’”

With a story that is about a race against time to save the world of Iri from destruction, I thought this was very entertaining, it was serious and heart-rending when it needed to be, but it made me giggle on several occasions with how the characters reacted with one another, especially people seeing the puppets alive. I liked Jack’s character, at first he’s not a very good person and you just really dislike him, but this story is ultimately about his redemption, and Winning does a fantastic job of surrounding him with a great support cast like Amelia, Toby, Zavanna and Brol, that makes it worth the time to see how he redeems himself to being a likable person.

If there was one issue I had, it was with the narration, a good narrator can make a good story better, and a bad one can make a good story, worse. I like Colin Mace, I really do, he’s a good reader of words, it’s crisp and clear, but his voice lacks personality because he has a very monotonous voice. This is no disrespect, but I like my narrators to be involved with the story itself, and Mace just doesn’t really do that, he reads what’s there and that’s it. It reminds me more of a narration from a docuseries, where the narrator is not supposed to show emotion or personality. Every once in a while, you get a glimpse of something good, but that’s only if the author has something in bold or it’s something in all caps. Anyone that decides to read this, I suggest doing it without audio, it’ll make for a better experience.