OK, so you peeped my curiosity. I appreciate the art in a good read. But, based on this intro I would be in well over my head. There are words here that I not only have no idea what they mean, but I can't even pronounce them. But other my relish in this written language.

Wish Mr Jon my best. grin

MARLEY

By Jon Clinch

“A Christmas Carol,” despite the multitudinous saccharine versions souped up on stage and screen every festive season, is a pretty damn scary thing, but Jon Clinch’s prequel to it is black as hell, outstripping even Dickens’s remorseless and painful probings of his protagonist’s soul. Wisely, Clinch has not attempted to pastiche Dickens (“The Inimitable,” as, somewhat tongue in cheek, he styled himself), finding instead a mordantly etched voice that instantly takes us over to the dark side: “The merchant ship Marie tied up at the Liverpool docks hours ago. … The fog over the Mersey is so thick that a careless man might step off the pier and vanish forever, straight down. But Jacob Marley is not a careless man.” By some uncanny act of artistic appropriation, he has, without imitating Dickens, entered into the phantasmagoric realm that is the great novelist’s quintessential territory, and, like the fat boy in “Pickwick,” he triumphantly succeeds in making our flesh creep.

But Clinch does much more than that: As in his first novel, “Finn,” with its variations on Twain’s “Huckleberry Finn,” he creates a penumbra of invention around the original novel ensuring — caveat lector! — that you may never be able to think of it in the same way again. Here, as there, he fleshes out characters and events often very lightly sketched in the original. “A Christmas Carol” was written at breakneck speed; Clinch endows Dickens’s snapshots with a three-dimensional, often alarming, life. Scrooge’s sister, Fan, a pallid presence in the novel (she dies young, always having been “a delicate creature”), proves, in Clinch’s reimagining, to be anything but pallid, coming to a tragic but profoundly romantic end.

His most startling and creative conception is the title character. After a prelude in which he establishes the deeply shady nature of Scrooge and Marley’s business, Clinch takes us back to 1787, to the beginning of their relationship at Professor Drabb’s brutal Academy for Boys, run on the principle of Manly Self-Determination, “whose tenets are explained in a framed broadsheet hanging upon the wall of each public room. The language employed by that disquisition is so archaic as to be very nearly Anglo-Frisian, and the logic wielded in its coils would mystify a scholar of the Talmud. … There is every chance that no party on earth, not even its ostensible author, has read it all the way through and survived.” The adolescent Marley immediately establishes a viselike hold over the newly arrived Scrooge

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