This delightfully good-humoured novel is the sort of genre scramble that doesn’t often work: there’s a bit of 1990s family saga, a bit of mobster crime thriller, a bit of Cold War goat-staring spy story and really quite a lot of psychic/psycho-kinetic fantasy. And yet Daryl Gregory, who won several impressive prizes a few years ago for his fabulous horror novella We Are All Completely Fine, pulls the whole thing off with the unflustered charm of a stage magician.
The setting is Chicago in the summer of 1995, where the Telemachus family, formerly a bunch of stage psychics and entertainers (‘Teddy Telemachus and His Amazing Family!’) have fallen on hard times. Irene, a disgraced thirtysomething accountant, has moved back to her widowed dad’s house with her teenage son Matty. Her brother Frankie is a deadbeat dad who hopes to pay off his debt to the Mafia by running a pyramid scheme.
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