In most good books, there’s always that fascinating side character that you wish you could learn more about, even though you know they’re not the focus of the story. That’s how I felt about Captain Melek, the mysterious female airship captain who features briefly in Ghost Machine by Kristen Brand, which I reviewed on this site just over a year ago. Lucky for me, my wish came true! Kristen Brand just released a new spinoff novel all about Captain Melek and her crew. Clockmaker: A Gothic Steampunk Novel comes out today, March 5, and is available on Amazon.
Told from the perspective of Captain Melek, Clockmaker follows the adventures of the airship Sultana a bit more than a year after the events of Ghost Machine. In the previous novel, the Sultana was attacked by armored mercenary soldiers and clockwork automatons, and Captain Melek watched many of her most loyal crew members die before her eyes. Now, with business crawling to a halt and only a handful of crew members to manage the ship, Melek is struggling to make ends meet. When a reclusive inventor named Mr. Lesauvage offers to pay a hefty sum in advance for merely transporting himself and some cargo to Istanbul, Melek knows that the job can’t be nearly as simple as it sounds. But with money so tight, she has no other choice but to take the risk. When Lesauvage’s dangerous enemies catch up to him, will Melek and her crew be strong enough to fend them off?
Though it carries the same subtitle of “A Gothic Steampunk Novel,” on the surface Clockmaker appears to be more steampunk than gothic in comparison to Ghost Machine. But don’t let the airship setting and clockwork gadgets fool you! Underneath the steampunk trappings are some serious nods to Gothic literature. Mr. Lesauvage is something of a mad scientist, reminiscent of Victor Frankenstein in his quest to master death, heedless of ethical obstacles. He’s also a man with deep secrets, who hides his scarred face behind a mask, a là the Phantom of the Opera. Ghosts once again play a prominent role in the story, despite the fact that Melek is not as sensitive to them as Ella from Ghost Machine.
One of the most important ways that Clockmaker interacts with the Gothic tradition is the way it takes on the concept of Orientalism. I’ve discussed this trope at length in my post “Gothic Tropes: The Evil, Exotic East.” Essentially, England and other imperialistic European countries had a bit of an obsession with depicting Eastern cultures in art and literature throughout the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries (in this case, the broadly defined “East” refers to everything from the Ottoman Empire to China). Gothic novels, as exemplified by William Beckford’s novel Vathek, tended to use this region as a source of unfamiliar mysterious magic and exotic villains. Clockmaker turns all of that around. In this book, the “Eastern” characters are the protagonists: Captain Melek and several members of her crew are Turkish. They face some discrimination while traveling abroad, and Melek in particular is subject to degrading stereotypes, as when another character suggests that she might be an “exotic concubine.” But Melek and her crew are neither sex objects nor villains, nor is their country of origin the source of supernatural evil in the story.
All around, Clockmaker held up to the expectations I’d set after reading Ghost Machine and was a fun new perspective on the world that Kristin Brand has created. If you’d like to read it yourself, you can find it as a Kindle ebook on Amazon or click this Bookshop.org affiliate link to buy it online in paperback or hardcover and support both indie bookstores and The Gothic Library in the process. You can also learn more about the author and read some of her short fiction on her website. If you read the book, be sure to let me know what you think in the comments!