SOURCE: “Down Underworld,” in Los Angeles Times Book Review, September 20, 1992, pp. 3, 12.

In the following review, Eder offers a generally favorable assessment of The Last Magician, though he finds fault in the novel's slow and disorienting start.

To get to the Australian rain forest from downtown Brisbane, you take Ann Street, go right on George to Roma Street, and follow the northwest artery as it successively becomes Kelvin Grove Road, Enoggera Road and Samford Road. After an hour or so, “you will cross that indistinct and provisional line where the city of Greater Brisbane could perhaps be said to end, and primordial time could be said to begin.”

Thus, in this opening passage of her Gothic mystery-tale of contemporary evil [The Last Magician], Janette Turner Hospital connects the matter-of-fact everyday world with the realm of the mythic. It is as if “The Divine Comedy” started by listing the bus...