The Music of Razors: A Novel

In nineteenth-century Boston, a young doctor on the run from the law falls in with a British confidence artist. Togetherâ and with dire consequencesâ they bring back to the light something meant to be forgotten.A world away in London, an absent father, haunted by the voice of a banished angel, presents his daughter with an impossible friendâ a clockwork ballerina.For two centuries, a bullet-removal specialist has wielded instruments of angel bone in service to a forgotten power . . . and now he vows to find someone else to shoulder the burden, someone with a conscience of their own, a strong mind, and a broken will. For a hundred years he has searched for the perfect contender, and now he has found two: a brother and a sister. Walter and Hope. Either will do.Last night something stepped from little Walterâ s closet and he never woke up. Now he travels the dark road between worlds, no longer entirely boy nor wholly beast, but with one goal in mind: to prevent his sister from suffering the same fate as he. Only the creature he has become can save Hope. But is it too late to save himself?From the Trade Paperback edition.

From Publishers Weekly

At the start of Australian author Rogers's inventive but disappointing debut, Walter, a four-year-old boy with sudden intimations of mortality, makes the mistake of banishing from his closet a monster who was actually his protector. This leaves him prey to the depredations of Henry, a former rogue medical student now aged over 150, whom we first meet in an unconvincing Boston of 1840, rife with such anachronisms as [...] doctors aware of bacteria. Henry is part of a circle of decadents who have conjured up a demon (the conjuring scene makes for one of the novel's especially vivid moments) but bungled their demonic deal. In a parallel world, Walter merges with the spirit of his protective monster, determined to protect his younger sister, Hope—Henry's next target. Rogers aims for a Neil Gaiman–style plot about evil versus spirituality, but lacks Gaiman's grace or charm. (May) Copyright © Reed Business Information, a division of Reed Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.

Locus

“Dark, disturbing, and filled with moments of real charm and magic, The Music of Razors is the best first novel I’ve seen this year.”

Neil Gaiman

“A nightmarishly imaginative debut from a writer of real assurance and vision . . . Cameron Rogers is going to go places.”

K. J. Bishop, author of The Etched City

“An exceedingly fine novel . . . You feel this book is true and the characters are real. The Music of Razors tells a beautiful and deeply affecting story, full of wonder, strangeness, pain, and love.”

Jeff Ford, author of The Girl in the Glass

“This was an impressive first novel. In The Music of Razors, Cameron Rogers weaves a thought-provoking and compelling dark fantasy from the mythology of religion.”

Sean Williams, author of The Crooked Letter

“Slippery and quick with a bite that won’t let go long after you turn the final page.”

Richard Harland, author of Ferren and the Angel

“Jam-packed with enough extraordinary ideas to fill a dozen novels. Never was fantasy darker or more disturbing. The novelistic equivalent of Twin Peaks.”

Paul Collins, author of Cyberskin

“This is a great book. Alice meets Freddy Krueger in Wonderland!”

From the Back Cover

"The Music of Razors is a nightmarishly imaginative debut from a writer of real assurance and vision. Watch him: he's going to go places." - Neil Gaiman "Dark, disturbing, and filled with moments of real charm and magic, The Music of Razors is the best first novel I've seen this year." - Locus In nineteenth-century Boston, a young doctor falls in with an British confidence artist. Together - and with dire consequences - they bring back to the light something meant to be forgotten. A world away in London, an absent father, haunted by the voice of a banished angel, presents his daughter with an impossible friend - a clockwork ballerina. For two centuries a bullet-removal specialist has wielded instruments of angel bone in service to a forgotten power... and now he vows to find someone else to shoulder the burden, someone with a conscience of their own, a strong mind and a broken will. For a hundred years he has searched for the perfect contender, and now he has found two: a brother and a sister, Walter and Hope. Either will do. Last night something stepped from little Walter's closet and he never woke up. Now he travels the dark road between worlds, no longer entirely boy nor wholly beast, but with one goal in mind: to prevent his sister from suffering the same fate as he. Only the creature he has become can save Hope. But is it too late to save himself?"Cameron Rogers writes like a magician." - K.J. Bishop, author of The Etched City The Music of Razors is superior fantasy, fast-paced and seductive. It digs deep for effect and delivers." - Sean Williams, author of The Resurrection Man "Packed with surreal images that haunt you long after you've put down the book." - Storm Constantine, author of The Wraeththu Trilogy

Excerpt. © Reprinted by permission. All rights reserved.

APOCRYPHA Seventy-two angels fell with Samael. As an angel is created it is gifted a function, portfolio, responsibilities. The angel charged with assigning power and function was a powerful angel indeed. Now that it grasped the concept of “rebellion” it truly understood how much power it held. The Power to assign Power. In the wake of this revelation other ideas followed, other realizations. This angel was staggered by the sheer enormity of what it might possess and achieve. Thus the angel sinned. An angel does not die. Anticipating what might occur should its audience with the Fallen One go badly, the angel seized upon another of its kind, sundered it, and stole the silver of its bones. From those bones the angel fashioned instruments approximating its own power. As the angel named them, they existed. Mercurial and undying, the living bone was bestowed with aspects of the angel’s own function. The function of assigning Form and Power. It then scattered these instruments across the Earth, a safeguard against the possibility of its own failure, and departed the presence of the God that had Created it. The angel found Samael in His new Kingdom, and made the Fallen One an offer of allegiance. An offer to create an army more powerful than that of Heaven, to seize what they had lost. Samael was Beauty. The angel could not look upon it. It was all it could do to remain upright and not fall to its knees, as did the seventy-two Fallen gathered around their Lord. The angel remembered the time of Samael’s birth. A thousand others had been created to sing His hosannas. “It was your touch that awoke me. That awoke all of us,” the Fallen Prince said. The crouched and bowed murmured anew. “It was you who assigned me Lordship over the Earth. You who granted me each and every attribute that I possess. You who seated me at the left hand of Our Father.” The Son of Morning’s countenance was beatific, inscrutable, unbearably perfect. “Do you recall the circumstance of our Casting Down?” Around Him, the Fallen softly moaned.The angel dared not speak. “Earth was to be a Paradise, our Father had said. A perfect place for the continued evolution of Itself. As Lord of the Hierarchy, as Lord of the Earth, as the very extension of the Godhead that had created that planet as a growing place for Itself, it was I who contended that a Paradise would be anathema to Growth. Nothing would come from comfort, from bliss. There must be conflict, there must be combat, there must be contrast. “I—Created for the voicing of just such an opinion—was denied. And that denial came in the form of our Casting Down.” Again, the seventy-two assembled moaned. A sound mournful and strange, each utterance different from the others, born of the forms they had been cursed with. “But there will be conflict. There will be combat. There will be growth. The time must come when the part of Godhead—the part of Ourself—that denied Myself is forced to reckon with that hypocrisy. It must see that hypocrisy has been Its undoing. That is the sole condition of victory I will accept. Triumph under any other circumstance is meaningless. “And so to you. You who have turned away from the Force that created you, not by virtue of your function, as did I, but out of avarice. An infant would recognize within you a desire to do so again, to any Master who offered you succor. You have no place here. “Begone.” The angel found itself exiled from Heaven and exiled from Hell. It found itself in the Presence of God. It looked into the Face of God, and was stripped. It lost its name. It lost its sigil. It lost its rituals, its summonings. It could no longer be spoken of within Heaven, nor within Hell, nor upon the Earth. An angel does not die. It simply would not Be. This done, it was Forgotten. It would spend eternity as unlimited potentiality without possibility of use. While, outside its nowhere prison, the instruments it had fashioned from the living bone of its murdered sibling waited to be found. To be used. To unlock that cage.

About the Author

Cameron Rogers lives in Melbourne. The Music of Razors is his first novel. He’s been an itinerant theater student, a stage director, a stand-up comic, a motion-capture model for an elf who needed food badly, and had a question mark instead of a photo in his high school yearbook. He spent three months cutting up vegetables in a stainless-steel cubicle beneath a shopping mall in the company of a defecting Soviet weightlifter, and almost got suckered into working at what turned out to be a yakuza-run all-gay bowling alley in Kyoto. His last Real Job was with the crime management unit of the Queensland Police Service. He also writes books for children under the penname Rowley Monkfish.

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