YORKSHIRE journalist David Barnett pieces together a fantastical story in this dizzying adventure story. His tale is so tall it threatens to give itself vertigo, yet he pulls off an imaginative feat in grand style.

Now fantasy books are not for everyone. They’re not for me, for a start. Not my sort of thing at all – or so I thought until I was a few chapters into Barnett’s highly engaging romp.

This is described on the back as the “ultimate Victoriana/steampunk mash-up”. These words may not enlighten everyone, but, put simply, what it means is that Barnett sets his novel in a recognisable historical period, and then has creative fun with the details. The effect is rather like reading a Victorian sci-fi novel, with travel by omnipresent airships or dirigibles, which can reach across the globe; in London people speed across the city by steam taxi.

This is the world as it used to be and yet never was. To this exciting mix, Barnett adds the disappearance of a fishing boat crew off Sandsend, apparently spirited away by evil shadows. Down the coast at Whitby, the writer Bram Stoker turns up seeking inspiration for his novels, meets Dracula – or, rather, Dracula’s sometimes fragrant missus – and ends up being drawn into great and dangerous adventures.

Gideon Smith of the title, whose father dies on that fishing boat at the beginning, sets out to put things right, with recourse to Captain Lucian Trigger, Hero of the Empire, whose tales are breathlessly conveyed in his favourite ‘penny dreadful’.

Only when Gideon finally tracks him down, Trigger is far from what he appears to be. Along the way, Gideon rescues Maria, the beautiful mechanical girl constructed by a man called Einstein, is almost seduced by a equally alluring airship pilot, and is propelled into an Egyptian adventure that smacks of Indiana Jones gone enjoyably weird.

Barnett should be congratulated on this imaginative journey.

Gideon Smith And The Mechanical Girl is published next month in the US by Tor Books, and then in September by Snowbooks.