The Magic Box (Arcane History #1) by Scott Thrower

[Ulysses]

The Magic Box (Arcane History #1)
By Scott Thrower
Periodically Productions, 2019
Five stars

This gets top marks from me for sheer novelty. Set in Toronto in 1916, as Canada is being mobilized for World War I, this is a book about magic; but it is magic treated in a way I’ve never encountered before, and it’s fascinating.

Charlie Graham is a doctoral student in classical antiquity, but his specialty—which makes him an outsider—is the arcane, the study of the history of magic. Until this very moment, Charlie has never believed magic was real, merely a cultural construct used as a tool for power.

Charlie occupies a big room in a shabby-genteel boarding house with his boyfriend, Henry, a medical student at the university. Living under the pretense of being roommates, Charlie and Henry keep their heads down to avoid trouble. Charlie is from a poor farm town called Berlin, while Henry is from much grander bloodlines. Charlie’s remarkable facility with language, and getting caught with a farmhand in the barn, are what brought him to Toronto.

Oh, Charlie is also dying of diabetes, for which, in 1916, there are no successful treatments. He has starved himself skeletal to keep his sugar levels down, and Henry has become as much his caretaker as his love interest.

Then Charlie is called to the newly-built Royal Ontario Museum late at night by his mentor and professor, to look at a mysterious stone box carved with unreadable runes and with no apparent opening. Almost accidentally, Charlie manages to reveal the box’s secret, unleashing something into the room—something that seems to cure his disease. The problem is that it isn’t only Charlie that felt the effects of whatever was in the box, and suddenly his life is turned upside down as frightening and violent events begin popping up all over the city.

I instantly thought of the “Widdershins” books by Jordan L. Hawk, but there is a darkness, a sense of creeping despair in this book that is altogether more sinister than Hawk’s great series. Thrower does something with this idea of magic that is both intellectually distant and emotionally charged. The frail, dying Charlie suddenly becomes a pawn in a game for which nobody really knows the rules, but for which the outcome could be apocalyptic if things go wrong.
I’ve already bought the second book, “Elemental” and look forward to finding out what comes next.

[Melissa]

Sounds interesting.