“Epic...emotionally gripping...dreamlike.... Catling weaves alternate history and retroactive mythmaking into a stunning whole.... He’s succeeded at writing a more balanced - and if this can be believed, slightly more conventional - novel this time around, which also bodes well for the trilogy’s upcoming finale, The Cloven. At the same time, The Erstwhile doesn’t depart radically from the devastating scope and dark spectacle that made The Vorrh one of the most arresting fantasy debuts in years - or Catling one of contemporary speculative fiction’s most imaginative writers.” (NPR.org)

“A dazzling psychedelic quest...viciously surreal.... The Erstwhile almost revels in its status as the hiatus between Genesis and Apocalypse. It applies the sleight of hand that many of the best middle-books do, for a shift of focus.... William Blake makes an appearance, as do Yiddish theatre, guillotines, radios that transmit from the future, premonitions of Shoah on Brick Lane, and a Ripper rumour. Some of this is part of a shared mythology of English esoterica. It’s no wonder that Sinclair, Alan Moore and Michael Moorcock have enthused over these books: Catling is using the same raw materials they do, but in a different manner.... Even in the most extreme moments Catling has an eye to the wry, to the momentous absurdity of just being a thing made of flesh in a world that is not.” (The Guardian)  

“Brian Catling’s The Erstwhile, like the work of Mervyn Peake, is outside genre. The stand-alone centre novel in a three-decker, it is even better than The Vorrh, the volume that preceded it.... Again we meet a variety of wonderful, often bizarre characters.... The plot is complex, monumental, engrossing and crammed with original images. If you like Peake’s Titus Groan, Catling’s splendid novel is probably for you.” (Michael Moorcock, The New Statesman)