Shockingly, perhaps, given my other interests, I have read very little by Tim Powers. Recently, seeking something I could read fairly quickly, I pulled a copy of his short novelette Nobody's Home from the bin and decided to give it a try. It has, presumably, a protagonist and setting familiar to his more dedicated readers, as it returns to the world of his popular novel The Anubis Gates (which, as noted, I haven't read).

Published at the end of 2014 by Subterranean Press, this slim volume -- at about 80 pages, with a large typeface and narrow columns of text -- was priced at a remarkably steep $35. Illustrations by J.K. Potter are lovely and certainly increase the value, and I imagine the deluxe hardcover edition with all of its bells and whistles helped, too.

I'll be honest, I suspect people like me who have not read Anubis Gates will be lost here. The summary on the back cover talks, for instance, about time travel, but there is none in evidence. This book is set firmly in Victorian England, albeit one with a very active community of ghosts.

You'll get a few clues to explain why the main character, Jacky, is fleeing the ghost of her fiance, and why she strolls around London in men's clothes and a fake mustache. But I never got a sense of who she really is, the era from which she came, her reason for time-traveling to this place and time, or what her capabilities are.

By book's end, Jacky is still pretty much a blank slate.

That said, Powers does an excellent job of creating his scenes. His take on Victorian London is drenched in smoke and mist, and you'll feel quickly at home in the setting.

All the same, Nobody's Home provides closure to something that occurred in The Anubis Gates and which won't mean a lot to someone who isn't deeply familiar with that novel. For me, it offered an enjoyable bit of Victorian fluff, suitably spooky and atmospheric but without proper resolution. Sadly, it wasn't enough to make me want to read the novel to find out what happened first.