For a while now, I’ve been thinking of this novel as the most Tim Powers-ish of the Onyx Court series, where Tim Powers-ness is defined as ramming a bunch of unrelated things together until a plot falls out. So far, some of the unrelated things chucked into here include the Underground, spiritualism, photography, Irish nationalist terrorism, Charles Babbage and Ada Lovelace, the West Ham disappearances, and Bazalgette’s sewers, and now my plot has decided it needs absinthe to function right.

At least for this one bit.

But it’s special absinthe, don’t you know. Because I can’t let the name “the green fairy” pass by untouched, or let or the not-as-hallucinogenic-as-advertised nature of absinthe get in the way of the effect I need. So the French fae have their own version. Are you surprised?