Black Gate

There won’t be a review next month, due to the holidays, and most likely the month after that, since I’ll be reading for Mysterion, which will be opening to submissions in January. However, I’ll be happy to accept new book review submissions to review once I’m back.

Dark Healer by Harry Leighton is one of those novels about which I felt conflicted afterward. I really enjoyed the story, and thought it worked well at drawing me in and keeping me reading. But there were significant weaknesses in the prose that interfered with my enjoyment.  I’ll get to that, but first, let’s talk about the story.

Marlen, the titular Dark Healer, is a skilled surgeon and also a mage, mixing magic with the common healing arts in order to make his patients better. Better being the key word here—he can improve eyesight, enable quicker healing, make them stronger, even add extra arms.  He’s a regular medieval Mengele, but way more successful. When bounty hunters Jonas and Alia begin tracking him, it’s because he’s begun buying people at illegal slave auctions, specifically the sick and disabled. Some he makes well so that they can serve him, others he uses as spare parts.

Jonas has a history with Marlen. At one point, they were friends, but they had a falling out right at the beginning of Marlen’s turn to a darker path. Now, living with regret for his own actions during that desperate time, Jonas is determined to make things right by hunting Marlen down. His apprentice Alia doesn’t have a personal stake, but she’s utterly devoted to her mentor and father-figure, Jonas.

Daeholf, Trimas, and Zedek are on the run. Trimas is an exiled ex-General, Daeholf a former military scout and saboteur who had a falling out with his commanders, and Zedek is an elf, hated and feared everywhere in the Empire. Their goal is to keep their heads down and survive. But when they find that Daeholf’s cousin has gone missing, and discovered a farm where the farmers are the harvest, they are also set on the trail of the healer Marlen.

When the two groups team up to take down Marlen, they find themselves embroiled in an incipient civil war, and at its core, the monsters Marlen’s created.

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I’m always looking for more books to review. If you have any, send them my way.

John Meszaros’s novel, At Yomi’s Gate, is a story about medieval Japan, in which every legend, myth, and religious belief are not only true, but play an active role in the story. Central to the story is the fire god Kagu-tsuchi. Lord Kotoheisei has trapped him in the Batsu-no-Kaji, from which he releases him only to wreak havoc on his enemies. Kagu-tsuchi is a mindless engine of destruction, destroying everything in his vicinity unless he can be controlled. This is not his story. Instead, it is the story of the Batsu-no-Kaji, a young woman named Sakura.

On Lord Kotoheisei’s first attempt to use his weapon, he loses control of Kagu-tsuchi. Ikuko, the priestess whose job it is to keep the fire god contained, escapes with Sakura, and Lord Kotoheisei is furious. He sends his nephew Fumito out to find his Batsu-no-Kaji and bring her back, on threat of murdering his family one-by-one. Fumito is no warrior, but an artist who uses illustrated scrolls to tell stories. Both he and Lord Kotoheisei know that the ink he uses is enchanted with the fire god’s magic, and will no doubt draw the Batsu-no-Kaji to him.

Fumito has no illusions about the kind of man his uncle is, and when he finds Sakura and Ikuko, he decides that he is willing to sacrifice his family to save thousands from Kagu-tsuchi’s fire. However, in their attempt to free Sakura of Kagu-tsuchi, they instead transfer Kagu-tsuchi’s magic into her. Bursting with her newfound power, Sakura decides she will rescue Fumito’s family and get her revenge on Lord Kotoheisei. The attack does not go as planned, however, and Fumito barely escapes Kotoheisei’s palace with his one surviving relative, his sister Yoko. Before the story is through, Ikuko, Sakura, Yoko, and Fumito will face ghosts and demons, gods and oni, and travel to the underworld of Yomi itself in order to defeat the forces trying to control Sakura’s fire.

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I’m back from my failed Kickstarter, and I’ll be looking for more books to review soon. If you have any, send them my way.

A History of Magic is the second book in Scott Robinson’s series about Rawk, the last great hero. I reviewed the first novel, The Age of Heroes, two years ago here at Black Gate.

Rawk is retired, but that doesn’t stop the exots–exotic monsters from other worlds–from randomly appearing in his city of Katamood. Technically, this should be his friend Weaver’s problem, as he’s the prince of the city, but the city guard that Weaver employs can’t be everywhere at once. And if a monster appears right in front of Rawk, he has to fight it. It’s expected, to judge from the crowds that materialize whenever that happens. But Rawk is getting slower, and he can’t save everyone, not even his audience, which doesn’t always have the good sense to keep its distance.

New heroes have been showing up from all over the world to fight the monsters. But heroes are lazy sorts, and they tend to hang out in taverns waiting for word of the monsters to come to them, and only then head out to kill the beast and collect the bounty. And very few of them have any interest in finding out where the monsters are coming from and stopping it–that would cause the bounties to dry up quick.

It must be caused by sorcerers, to judge from the magical portals producing the monsters. Weaver’s solution would be to send his guards from door-to-door hunting down sorcerers–real or imagined–but Rawk would rather avoid that. So he recruits Sylvia, half-elven sorceress and former enemy, current healer, to help him out. Together, they track down various sorcerers who have little real magic between them, trying to discover who’s behind the exots. Clearly, none of these sorcerers could light a candle with magic on their own, but if enough of them worked together . . .

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I may miss the next month or so, due to the Mysterion Kickstarter and a workshop I’m attending, but please keep sending me books to review, and I’ll get to them soon — see the instructions here.

Steven Kelliher’s The Emerald Blade is a sequel to his novel The Valley of Embers, which I reviewed at Black Gate last year. It follows the fire-wielding Ember Kole, and Linn, who inherited the air-wielding abilities of the White Crest. After defeating the White Crest, they set out to pursue T’alon Rane, the corrupted King of the Embers, whom they hope will lead them to the Eastern Dark, the Sage who is bringing the Dark Kind of the World Apart to their world.

They are joined by two fellow Embers, Misha and Jenk, and the massively strong Rockbled Baas. Both Embers and Rockbled are Landkist, gifted power by the lands in which they live, as opposed to the Sages, who take power from the land. Kole’s and Linn’s expedition travels to the Emerald Road, a rainforest where massive trees form multiple layers of canopy atop one another, and traveling along the Road involves moving from layer to layer. There they discover that the Sage Balon Rael has come to the Emerald Road, seeking the Emerald Blade, the name for both a man and the weapon he wields, a weapon that’s all that remains of the Emerald Sage.

T’alon Rane seeks both the Emerald Blade and the death of Balon Rael, on the orders of the Eastern Dark, but to achieve his goals, he temporarily allies himself with Balon Rael while looking for an opportunity to betray him. Meanwhile, Kole and Linn and their group ally themselves with the Emerald Blade. Similar to the first book, shifting alliances and tenuous loyalties make the action unpredictable, as the sides realign constantly right up to the end.

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I’d like to keep the monthly schedule going, so please keep sending me books to review — see the instructions here.

Reagan Moon is a paranormal reporter working for the Blue Crescent, an LA tabloid. He’s good at his job, and one of the things that makes him so good is he doesn’t believe. Oh sure, there are strange things out there: cults and designer drugs and brain hacks, but nothing supernatural. Nothing that can’t be explained. He hasn’t believed in much since his dad died, and his girlfriend’s, Ellie’s, death less than a year ago only made him more of a cynic.

But tabloids don’t pay a whole lot, and if a rich eccentric wants to pay him to talk to a medium, he’s game. The problem is that Klammer wants him to make contact with Ellie, hinting that she wasn’t incinerated in a freak accident but rather harvested for some grotesque purpose. In grand noir tradition, Reagan is soon dodging the police on suspicion of being involved in the death of said medium. Whether holed up with the Mad Spaniard and his daughters, Kanya and Cricket, in their Asylum for strange artifacts, or following a lead to the Spiraplex, a grand building/science experiment centered around a giant statue of Anubis, and built by Klammer’s old business partner and rival, Soren Volden, Reagan is constantly in over his head.

The Ghost Box is the first book in Mike Duran’s Reagan Moon series. I reviewed the second book, Saint Death, last year, but I figured I should go back and cover the first one. Mike Duran started publishing in the Christian market, writing novels such as The Resurrection and The Telling, both of which contained supernatural elements that don’t neatly fit Christian theology, for which he received blow back from many readers of Christian fiction. The Ghost Box is an effort to get outside the narrow restrictions that limit what he can do in Christian publishing. Mike Duran doesn’t hide his Christian worldview, but neither is he pushy about it.

In fact, it’s clear that Reagan Moon is not a believer in pretty much anything. And there’s no conversion experience in this book. Or rather, it’s not a conversion to Christianity so much as a conversion to hope, an acknowledgment that there’s more to this world than the physical, that our spirits do survive after death.

Of course, to get there, Reagan Moon first has to see it with his own eyes. Enter Rival’s Curtain.

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I just spent the weekend on a ship, with very limited Internet access, so I’m afraid this month’s review is a bit late. The good news is that there is a self-published book review this month. I’d like to keep the monthly schedule going, so please keep sending me books to review–see the instructions here. 

Clearwater Dawn by Scott Fitzgerald Gray is a love story. It’s about the love between the half-Ilvani orphan Chriani and Lauresa, the daughter of an Ilmar prince and a sorcerous Leisanmira.

Chriani is the apprentice of Lauresa’s warden, Barien. At the age of eighteen, Chriani should have his own commission, but his temper, and Barien’s outsider status at court, have left him an unranked tyro. Despite this, he is very good at his job, aided by the preternatural senses he inherited from his Ilvani father, and the training in moving quietly and picking locks he received from his mother.  On a night of betrayal and death, Barien is murdered, and Prince Chanist marches off to war against the Valnirata Ilvani war clans. Chriani is left behind, unofficial guardian of the princess, sole keeper of Barien’s last words. When Lauresa hears them, and learns that Chriani was unable to share them with the prince before he left, she heads out to make sure her father learns of the betrayal Barien revealed. Chriani catches up with her before she gets far, and accompanies her to find her father, who may know more than they expect.

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I’m still running behind on book reviews, but I’ve started to receive submissions again. Please keep them coming–see the instructions here.

The Seventh Colour by Will Davidson is the tale of a society in stagnation. A thousand years ago, the elves departed, and the dwarves’ slow decline led to their eventual extinction, leaving the humans alone in the world. But magic faded with the elves, and the humans were never able to match the dwarves’ technical ingenuity, so all they had were the technology and social structures left by their departed allies. And whether they worked for the dwarves and the elves or not, human society is dying trying to cling to those things.

The story is told in multiple ways. The first, and most straightforward, is the view of Tomas, an investigator in Rivertop looking into the disappearance of a number of individuals whom his boss, Victor, believes were involved in an incident that injured Victor and killed his wife. Interspersed with Tomas’s perspective is the redacted confession of subject T187356, who recounts his harrowing encounters with highwaymen and orks and the criminal rebellion that his aunt and uncles are involved with. These converge when Tomas meets the vanished individuals, and we recognize the interrogated subject as one Alyster Trale. He and his sister, Elyssa, are currently under the protection of their parents’ friends. Far from arresting his suspects, Tomas joins them on their journey to find someplace safe for Alyster and Elyssa, and he hears them out as they travel.

Merson, Forba, Rauor, Lias, Lariad, and Pepina were all good friends at University, and like many University students, they held many long discussions about the ills of the world, and what could be done about them. They hit upon the idea that they should seek out the vanished elves, and went about learning what they could of them. Much of the novel is their account to Tomas of their quest, twenty years before this new journey he’s joined them on.

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