James Nicoll Reviews

Sam Mills’ The Watermark is a stand-alone literary fantasy.

Jaime Lancia’s BA did not lead to full-time employment; his thesis is not progressing; and his pizzeria boss steals Jaime’s tips. As for Jaime’s relationship with Rachel Levy, Rachel might as well have fallen off the face of the planet. Thus, when offered a chance to interview the extremely reclusive author Augustus Fate, Jaime embraces the opportunity.

Foreboding sentence here.

Augustus Fate has hit a creative wall. No amount of insisting that his publisher fire assistants who aren’t sufficiently lickspittle can conceal the truth that Fate’s upcoming work, in its current form, is a bit of a dud. What to do?

Jaime begins to get an inkling that Fate does not wish him well as the effects of the odd tea he was served begin to kick in. An addled Jaime barely has time to discover that one room in Fate’s isolated cottage contains the body of an unconscious woman when Jaime joins her in unconsciousness… and worse.

We now move to Oxford, 1861, where Thomas’ childhood features a dead mother, a distant father, servants, the unfortunate Rachel (no doubt fated for the madhouse), and the eccentric Mr. Gwent. It is thanks to Gwent that Thomas learns some vital info.

Thomas is in fact Jaime, trapped in a novel by author Fate. So is Gwent. So is Rachel. This is why she stopped responding to email. Trapping real people in fictional worlds appears to be Fate’s solution to his creative block.

Gwent believes escape is possible… but not for Gwent, whose mortal body Gwent believes to have perished in Fate’s cottage. Jaime and Rachel might be able to escape into other literary works. From there, they can find the fabled Storyteller, and thus win their way back to their real bodies and real lives.

Jaime is in no way convinced that the Storyteller is anything more than a legend, but it’s not as if there were any alternative escape routes on offer. Jaime and Rachel begin their odyssey through the worlds of literature. What they find is a mixture of the mundane, the science-fictional, and the very much dystopian. Also, the answer to a vexing question: if someone dies in a living dream, do they die in real life as well?

~oOo~

This novel does not make a strong case for the competence of British police; while they do take an interest in the fact that people seem to vanish after visiting Fate, they never stumble over the bodies Fate has stashed here and there.

I can think of a few works in which authors manage to send real people into fictional universes. The tales that come to mind don’t paint a favorable image of authors. Odd, as the stories themselves were written by authors.

I don’t quite know why I didn’t enjoy this novel as much as I might have. Was it my lack of appreciation for whimsy? My distaste for romantic tropes? Perhaps I wasn’t sufficiently familiar with the author’s literary inspirations, as I could see that there were references that I was just not getting.

I couldn’t help but wonder, in my commonsensical way, what would happen in that fictional universe after the events at the end of the book. It is now known that people can be projected into fictional universes and that people in those universes do not necessarily perish when their mortal bodies do. How quickly would the world empty once people discovered they could leg it for their favorite book?

As for romantic tropes: I found the romance in this novel actually horrifying, because what would have been in the real world a passing fancy became a grand romance, thanks to the tropes of romantic fiction. It seems that you would lose some or all of your own agency if you did succeed in sliding into a book. Hmmm. Perhaps the world wouldn’t empty.

Aside from the worldbuilding… The author imagined her diverse secondary universes (Victorian, a 2014 in which the 2008 financial crisis never occurred, a Russian dystopia, and London in 2047) with much vividness; she added pointed commentary about the modern world¹; and she managed to write engaging characters. I should have liked this book more than I did!

The Watermark is available here (Melville House), here (Barnes & Noble), here (Bookshop US), here (Chapters-Indigo), and here (Words Worth Books).

I did not find The Watermark at Bookshop UK.

1: From our current (2025) perspective people in 2024 had it easy, but of course they couldn’t know that.