Jago begins with the Reverand Mr. Timothy Charles Bannerman claiming that they will be lead by an Angel on the road to Paradise. He has tiny English village of Alder to give up all earthly possession including the clothes the village worn to be burned in a fire. The next day, life continuing to go on. There were no Angel to lead them to Heaven.Several years later, Paul and Hazel came to Alder. Paul was hoping to finished his thesis about the end of the world and Hazel was hoping to creates some decent and marketable pottery. Being in a small town, there was no way of avoiding a religious cult Agapemone lead by Jago especially when they are holding a country fair in Alder. At first, the followers of Agapemone seemed nice and decent. No one in Alder has seen Jago since he has moved his followers into the mansion. No one in Alder seemed to be concerned about Jago and his followers.Slowly things were starting to happened. Things that people feared were becoming real and none are able to escape their fears.Jago is a very long book with so many point of view from each characters. Wendy, a handmaiden of Jago, was running away from her past of an abusive relationship. Her fear started the first manifestation. As each villagers' darkside came out, that negative energy was feeding into Jago's ego and his belief that he is the Messiah. To me, any cult leader who believed that he is God, has been played over and over even in real life, is already a given that there will be a mass murders of people. The only difference is that Jago has psychic abilities that can make people see what they want to see before they conditioned that Jago is their savior. This story does have a bit of paranormal activities. As all cult, a person has to fall beyond hopeless and despair into believing the lies of a cult leader. Jago was able to use the fear and the darkside of each individual's nature to manipulate each to his will. Even the character Susan has pointed out that Jago's real interest was sex and to manipulate sex. There were real no substances to Jago's preaching.The good thing about this story is that Jago is a secondary character that the story just touches and then moves on to the other major characters in the book.
Originally written by Kim Newman in 1991, Jago still feels fresh. I have really enjoyed his Anno Dracula series and Professor Moriarty and the Hound of the D’Urbervilles. Prior to reading these novels, I was only familiar with Newman as writer for Empire magazine and film buff.As before, he demonstrates an encyclopaedic knowledge for the horror and film genre. Jago references The Wicker Man, Deliverance, Straw Dogs, HG Wells and many more. The first third of the novel neatly builds the local legend, the imminent Glastonbury-like festival, a few not-so friendly locals and excitable visitors flooding to the quiet Westcountry village of Alder.The mysterious and enigmatic Jago is at the heart of it all, yet Newman skillfully manages restraint, keeping him in the background, a strong presence whose tentacles will soon reach everyone and everything.This is a multi-perspective novel, told from the point of view of Alison, Danny, festival goer Ferg, the mischievous Gilpin brothers and the Maskell family, among many others. Newman is excellent at inhabiting their thoughts and various speech inflections, granted he is their creator, but it is a special talent who can shift so seamlessly and skillfully from person to person in telling their story.Jago is packed with startling and bizarre scenes, some are comic, and others are graphically horrific and shocking. In fact, it is sometimes so over the top you just have to laugh, taking everything with a generous pinch of salt. James Lytton is a compelling heroic character and the gifted Susan also helps to keep the pages turning. It is a long novel with an awful lot going on, which may put off some, but I found there were enough supernatural and pyrotechnic shocks to hold my interest.This new edition also includes some short stories, so you cannot complain of a lack of content.It is not my favourite Newman novel, but Jago and its powerful and disturbing images lingered in my mind long after I had finally put it down.
What do You think about Jago (2013)?
Yeah! This book ruled. A lot more enjoyable than I thought i would have been. While it does indulge in that bone-headed device of changing the tone of a third person narrative depending on the character a particular passage is focused on, overall it was a totally unpretentious, gory, creative (at times psychedlic, sometimes so much so that I didn't really get what was going on), fun book. This was the first book I've read by Kim Newman, a dude I never gave a chance to before because a) he has a girl's name, and b) He wrote a book with a title like Dracula Cha Cha Cha or something like that, something that sounded so awful to me at the time that I thought I'd never read one of his books. But I'm relaxing my standards in my old age I guess, and kind of lok forward to read more books by him. He's kind of like Clive Brker in his outlandish imagination, but less pretentious (and less skilled as a wordsmith, it must also be said). There need to be more books like this and less like Huraki Mrakami's books.
—Clint
I'm a huge fan of Kim Newman's Anno Dracula and Diogenes Club Books, so i was very disappointed with this one. A powerful psychic with delusions of messiahhood runs a cult in a small English village, and when a counterculture music festival comes to town it all goes bad in a way which Stephen King would thoroughly recognise but would not be so unimaginative to put to paper. Too much pointless plot-irrelevant gore/sex/gory sex for the sake of it, too much supposedly cutting observational criticism of post-Thatcher Britain, too few multidimensional characters who acts as more than class stereotypes, and too little focus on the plot. This is a series of rejected scenes dragged up from the cutting room floor of a low-budget horror movie studio, not a novel.(
—Greg
Jago is a horror of epic proportions and definitely not one for the faint hearted!Taken from a historic account of a cult-ish gathering in Britain and given ghoulish stature from the imagination of a dark but brilliant narrator. The modern setting of a small but self appreciative village playing host not only to routine summer visitors but to a music festival is a touch of genius for the plot. As you'd expect, there are some misgivings abut the necessity of the festival for the future of the village and exploring the emotions and reactions to this in the first half of the book gives a rich display of our characters in all their glory. Interwoven between chapters are glimpses of a back story which gives the reader a further insight, not always clarifying but certainly enlightening. There were times whilst reading this grandiose, macabre story that I wanted it to come to a conclusion quickly, then there were times when the humor and the beautifully descriptive narrative carried me along on a wave of bile and blood that only a "Barkeresque" horror can do proficiently. This is the first Kim Newman book I've read but will certainly be adding his name to my top 10 Horror writers and I look forward to starting his Anno Dracula series.
—Lynn
