SciFi/Fantasy Novella Review: The Haunting of Tram Car 015 by P. Djèlí Clark

The Haunting of Tram Car 015 by P. Djèlí Clark

It's kind of hard for anyone interested in the SF/F field to ignore the work of P. Djèlí Clark right now.  Last year alone he managed to write two stories - a novella and a short story - which earned him not one but two Nebula and two Hugo nominees a piece, and my reading of those stories (one of which, The Black God's Drums, you can find a review of here) suggests that these nominations were well deserved.  So yeah, he's a pretty hot author right now for good reason, with his stories being fun, interesting, and yet also dealing with issues of race, sex and gender at the same time.  None of these stories have been novel length, but they've all been well done and pack a punch.

The Haunting of Tram Car 015 actually is a sequel to a prior short story of Clark's, A Dead Djinn in Cairo (which can be found here), but no prior knowledge of that earlier story is needed to enjoy this one (I didn't read Dead Djinn until after finishing this novella).  And it's really good - a fun story in an alternate steampunk early 20th century Cairo, where djinn and robots seem to exist alongside each other in an independent Egypt, and combine with real life issues of the time to create a unique setting.  Definitely another winner for Clark here.



Quick Plot Summary:  Agent Hamed Nasr is a veteran agent of the Ministry of Alchemy, Enchantments and Supernatural Entities in Cairo, and when he and his rookie partner, Agent Onsi Youssef, are assigned to check into claims of a haunted tram car, he doesn't expect to find much.  But what he finds is a spirit of a type he's never seen before, one which seems resistant to all measures to remove it - if Hamed can scrounge up the funds from the Ministry's budget to even pay for such measures.  Amidst a Cairo on the verge of massive change, with women demonstrating in the streets in favor of women's suffrage, Hamed and Onsi will need to use all their wits to stop the strange spirit, before it actually hurts someone seriously.

Thoughts:  The plot summary above is one of the easiest I've written in a while, with a lot of this book being "Hamed and Onsi try a method to remove the haunting, resulting in them interacting with new and interesting parts of this Cairo, failing but learning more, and then trying again".  And yet, in the process, the book covers oh so much that the summary leaves out - we see women in Cairo demonstrating in the streets and their organizers fighting for women's rights in an Egypt that threw out its colonial oppressors via magical power; we see a woman fighting against the idea of AIs not having complete freedom; we see research into the different methods for exorcising a spirit and the different names those spirits have in different countries....it's an awful lot.  And yet it's never overwhelming, always fascinating, and just plain fun from beginning to end.  You might think from the start that we're going to have a buddy cop situation going on with the grizzled vet and the idealistic newb, but we really don't and both agents bring their own skills to the table that make them each easy to root for.  The only odd point of this book is the character from "A Dead Djinn in Cairo" who makes repeated appearances who kind of felt out of place, but other than that, this novella is just plain great fun.