As the story progresses, Thomas befriends several eccentrics who offer something he has never experienced before: true friendship and acceptance. Thomas is a likable protagonist and an implausible hero because he is often nonplussed and a complete misfit. The events of the overall story are fluid, and several characters are, dare we say in such a peculiar novel, charming. Liss’s writing style is original and mosaic. It is now a race against the clock to save the family bank from potential ruin and unearth Walter’s treachery and strange reason for ordering Thomas to marry a specific woman without delay. Even Thomas is different because he is well on his way to succumbing to the arboreal plague he is sprouting leaves and slowly becoming a tree. Go a bit deeper, and you find parallels between the unfortunate people who have transformed into Peculiarities and societal outcasts who are viewed as the Other, and thus feared and hated. On the surface, this story is immersed in the world of magic and astral projection, with real-life occultist Aleister Crowley as Thomas’s unlikely friend and champion in this bizarre journey. For the past decade, people have been tormented by diabolical creatures called the Elegants and are often morphing into Peculiarities, such as wolf people, tree people, and females who mysteriously birth rabbits. From the onset, Thomas and his new friends grasp at straws, trying to guess what is happening at Thresher’s Bank and in London on the brink of the twentieth century. In The Peculiarities by David Liss, magical realism meets fantasy meets cautionary tale, resulting in a complex story that is sure to astound and entertain any reader who is game for an offbeat and extraordinary adventure. And so begins this fantastical tale of greed, secrets, peculiarities, bravery, and mettle beyond measure. Nothing is as it seems, and Thomas soon embarks on a mysterious and quite deadly quest for the truth hidden within the bank, his brother’s house, and several strategically located buildings throughout London. After his father’s death, the older son, Walter, takes over Thresher’s Bank and cryptically brings the previously shunned Thomas into the fold as a junior clerk. Thomas Thresher is the younger son in a banking family in 1899 London. We often become heroes when we have nothing left to lose and when doing the right thing takes precedence over personal gain and comfort.
“Sometimes magic is spectacular, but sometimes it is merely ordinary.”
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