Djinn in modern times

Question

I read this novel about 10 or 15 years ago, but it might be a bit older than that. Not very old, though, not much more than 20 years old, I think. I'm pretty sure I read it in English. I don't think it was a translation from some other language.

It takes place in our world, in our time period but djinn exist, hidden somewhere in mountains in the Middle East. Some guy is trying to use their power for his own purposes.

I don't remember much of it, and totally forgot the end, but I think it did not work the way this guy expected.

Answer 1

Possibly Tim Powers' novel Declare, which is set during the Second World War, and in the 1960s, about a secret agency hidden within British Secret Services, with the goal of destroying the Djinni that is secretly supporting the Soviet Union.

Answer 2

The Golem and The Jinni by Helene Wecker fits what you've described, though the story is set close to WW1. The author just came out with a sequel in 2021 too.

Answer 3

The Alex Verus series of books by Benedict Jacka have Djinn, The first book came out in 2012 and the last book came out in 2021.

I forget which book they are first introduced properly but the Monkey's Paw plays a significant part in one of the early books, and the wishes always end up going wrong for the holder. We find out in a later book that the Monkey's Paw turns out to be a trapped Djinn who hates humans, especially mages.

I believe there is a Djinn's tomb featured in the 7th book Burned, and this Djinn is a major antagonist in later books.

Goodreads series link

Answer 4

The Old Genie Hottabych (1938).

A children's book by Lazar Lagin.

This amusing and fascinating children's book is often called the Russian "Thousand and One Nights."
Who is the old Genie Hottabych?
This is what the author has to say of him: "In one of Scheherazade's tales I read of the Fisherman who found a copper vessel in his net. In the vessel was a mighty Genie -a magician who had been imprisoned in the bottle for nearly two thousand years. The Genie had sworn to make the one who freed him rich, powerful and happy.
"But what if such a Genie suddenly came to life in the Soviet Union, in Moscow? I tried to imagine what would have happened if a very ordinary Russian boy had freed him from the vessel.
"And imagine, I suddenly discovered that a schoolboy named Volka Kostylkov, the very same Volka who used to live on Three Ponds Street, you know, the best diver at summer camp last year . . . On second thought, I believe we had better begin from the beginning . . . "

Answer 5

I'd go for Marge Piercy's He, She and It published as Heart of Glass in the UK.

The time is the middle of the twenty-first century. The place is what used to be North America, now Norika: a vast toxic wasteland dotted with huge environmental domes, enclaves of the monolithic corporations-the “multis”-that have replaced governments and whose employees have become an indentured citizenry; the far fewer “free towns,” independent settlements where the remarkable technology of the age has not yet been turned against the individual; and the “Glop,” the overwhelmed stretches of megalopolis where nine-tenths of the Norikans live – violent, festering warrens unprotected from the poisonous atmosphere and ruled by feuding gangs and warlords.

It is in this world that Shira Shipman struggles to find her place. Shira is a woman who longs for the traditions of her upbringing even as she breaks from them; a woman whose life has been “shattered into bright dangerous shards” by the loss of custody of her young son. Now, as the novel opens, she is returning to Tikva, the Jewish free town where she was raised. . . but she finds no easy respite in going home. Her part in the creation of an illegal cyborg – more nearly human than any created before, given life in order to protect the town, but truly brought to life by Shira’s deep and startling involvement with it – places her, her young son and her elderly grandmother at the center of a deadly battle for information, the most important commodity of the time. If the cyborg is man-built, it is woman-programmed, and that woman has been a lifelong rebel and sexual iconoclast.