The Music of Razors: A Novel

“Dark, disturbing, and filled with moments of real charm and magic, The Music of Razors is the best first novel I’ve seen this year.”—Locus

In nineteenth-century Boston, a young doctor on the run from the law falls in with a British confidence artist. Together—and with dire consequences—they bring back to the light something meant to be forgotten.

A world away in London, an absent father, haunted by the voice of a banished angel, presents his daughter with an impossible friend—a clockwork ballerina.

For two centuries, a bullet-removal specialist has wielded instruments of angel bone in service to a forgotten power . . . and now he vows to find someone else to shoulder the burden, someone with a conscience of their own, a strong mind, and a broken will. For a hundred years he has searched for the perfect contender, and now he has found two: a brother and a sister. Walter and Hope. Either will do.

Last night something stepped from little Walter’s closet and he never woke up. Now he travels the dark road between worlds, no longer entirely boy nor wholly beast, but with one goal in mind: to prevent his sister from suffering the same fate as he. Only the creature he has become can save Hope. But is it too late to save himself?

Praise for The Music of Razors

“A nightmarishly imaginative debut from a writer of real assurance and vision . . . Cameron Rogers is going to go places.”—Neil Gaiman

“An exceedingly fine novel . . . You feel this book is true and the characters are real. The Music of Razors tells a beautiful and deeply affecting story, full of wonder, strangeness, pain, and love.”—K. J. Bishop, author of The Etched City

“This was an impressive first novel. In The Music of Razors, Cameron Rogers weaves a thought-provoking and compelling dark fantasy from the mythology of religion.”—Jeff Ford, author of The Girl in the Glass

“Slippery and quick with a bite that won’t let go long after you turn the final page.”—Sean Williams, author of The Crooked Letter

“Jam-packed with enough extraordinary ideas to fill a dozen novels. Never was fantasy darker or more disturbing. The novelistic equivalent of Twin Peaks.”—Richard Harland, author of Ferren and the Angel

“This is a great book. Alice meets Freddy Krueger in Wonderland!”—Paul Collins, author of Cyberskin

Cameron Rogers lives in Melbourne. The Music of Razors is his first novel. He’s been an itinerant theater student, a stage director, a stand-up comic, a motion-capture model for an elf who needed food badly, and had a question mark instead of a photo in his high school yearbook. He spent three months cutting up vegetables in a stainless-steel cubicle beneath a shopping mall in the company of a defecting Soviet weightlifter, and almost got suckered into working at what turned out to be a yakuza-run all-gay bowling alley in Kyoto. His last Real Job was with the crime management unit of the Queensland Police Service. He also writes books for children under the penname Rowley Monkfish.