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Sean T. M. Stiennon reviews The Black Opera

Sean T. M. Stiennon reviews The Black Opera

the-black-operaThe Black Opera
By Mary Gentle
Night Shade Books ($15.99, trade paperback, 531 pages, May 2012)

I bought a copy of The Black Opera based on the sheer strength of its premise. A fat fantasy novel set in the baroque world of opera, centered around a production engineered to call Satan himself up from Hell? Sign me up for a first class ticket. If there’s anything that Andrew Lloyd Weber has taught us, it’s that opera is the perfect setting for burning passion, dark secrets, and adventure in the shadows. Adding a diabolical scheme into the mix seems like a perfect way to roll the awesome dial up past 11.

However, the first thing I noticed about The Black Opera is that it wasn’t anything close to the lurid, swash-buckling, cult-fighting novel I wanted. It is, in fact, a rather restrained and stately affair, more concerned with the enlightened intellectual climate of the early 19th century than with blood, romance, and action.

Our hero is Conrad Scalese, an opera librettist living in Naples in the third decade of the 18th century. His first great success, a heretical opera entitled Il Terrore di Parigi, has earned him the malicious regard of the iron-handed Inquisition. Only the intervention of the King Ferdinand saves him from imprisonment, but in return for the king’s protection, Conrad must accept a difficult task.

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Sean T. M. Stiennon reviews The Mist-Torn Witches

Sean T. M. Stiennon reviews The Mist-Torn Witches

The Mist-Torn Witches15808272
by Barb Hendee
Roc (336 pages, mass market first edition May 7, 2013, $7.99)

The Mist-Torn Witches isn’t exactly the novel I wanted, but it fits into a category of novel I’d like to see more of. It’s modest in the best senses of the word: Focused on a handful of characters, limited to a single setting (a prince’s castle), and with a tightly focused plot, centered around a magically-enhanced murder investigation. It also manages to be relatively light in pacing and tone, something I’d like to see more of in a market seemingly saturated with the gruesome, grim, and gut-splattered.

Orphaned sisters Celine and Amelie are a likable pair. Celine was trained my her mother as an apothecary, but makes most of her income by pretending to have inherited her mother’s powers as a seer and distributing invented fortunes, while Amelie is an armed-and-dangerous tomboy who serves as the duo’s muscle. They’re forced to flee their rural home when Celine, for the first time, has a truly prophetic vision. Unfortunately for her, that vision is of local ruler Sub-Prince Damek murdering his betrothed after the wedding, which drives Celine to warn the girl away from marrying him.  Celine and Amelie are forced to seek refuge with Damek’s younger brother, Anton, and his brave guard captain, Jaromir.

Anton is a just ruler, and his people are happy, but not all is well within the walls of his castle. Young women are being murdered under mysterious circumstances, their bodies turning up as withered husks. Anton offers the sisters a deal: Use Celine’s newfound powers of true prophecy to find the killer and they’ll be rewarded with an apothecary shop inside his walls. Fail, and they’ll be turned out to make their way alone, vulnerable to the wrath of Sub-Prince Damek.

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Sean T. M. Stiennon reviews Circle of Enemies

Sean T. M. Stiennon reviews Circle of Enemies

Circle of EnemiesCircle of enemies cover
By Harry Connolly
Del Rey (320 pages, mass market first edition August 2011, $7.99)

And so we come full circle. Circle of Enemies is the final novel in the Twenty Palaces series as it stands, and in some ways the most crowded with monsters, sorcery, and mysteries. If it has one major flaw, it’s that it whet my appetite for a sequel that will likely never be written.

The action moves south from the Pacific northwest hamlets of Child of Fire (my review here) and Game of Cages (review) to the sun-scorched sidewalks and shadowy mansions of Los Angeles, as Ray revisits the life he lived before his stay in prison. One of his old friends from his carjacker days — a woman named Caramella — arrives in Ray’s Seattle room with a cryptic message: “You killed me, Ray.” After delivering it, she vanishes into thin air.

Magic — and all the horrors that accompany it — have found Ray’s old crew. He drives south to his old stomping grounds in Los Angeles to find his old allies and save them before the Twenty Palaces society arrives to wipe them out. The world is once again in danger from a predator with the potential to annihilate all human life, one hapless victim at a time.

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Sean T. M. Stiennon reviews Game of Cages

Sean T. M. Stiennon reviews Game of Cages

Game of Cages
By Harry Connollygames-of-cages
Del Rey (352 pages, mass market first edition August 2010, $7.99)

The opening line of Game of Cages, the chronologically third volume in the Twenty Palaces series, is:

“It was three days before Christmas, and I was not in prison.”

How’s that for a back story in a sentence? The truth, Ray Lily thinks, is that he should be in prison, given the actions he took during his battles with supernatural evil in Pacific-coast hamlet Hammer Bay. Ray broke into homes, burned down a brothel, and had a hand in the deaths of several people.

But one of the spells carved into his flesh by Annalise’s magic is the twisted path. His face is difficult to recall, his fingerprints no longer match the ones on file, and his DNA tests are inconclusive.  And so, months after the Hammer Bay incident, he’s a free man, preparing to celebrate his first Christmas since leaving prison.

But the Twenty Palaces society has other plans for him. On that night three days before Christmas, a woman named Catherine finds him at the grocery store. She’s an informer and scout for the society, and collects Ray to help her investigate a rumored auction of a captured magical predator scheduled to take place at an isolated mansion high up in the Cascade Range.

But by the time they arrive, the auction is already over, and the predator has escaped from its buyer, leaving behind a strange plastic cage, an overturned semi-truck, and a trail of circular footprints that suddenly vanish in the snow. Ray and Catherine must race to find the creature before it settles into a feeding ground, and before any of the auction’s other participants find and claim it for their own purposes.

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Sean T. M. Stiennon reviews Twenty Palaces

Sean T. M. Stiennon reviews Twenty Palaces

Twenty PalacesTwenty Palaces Cover
By Harry Connolly
Self-Sabotage Press (E-book, $2.99, November 2011, available on Kindle and Nook)

This seems as good a time and place as any to say a word about the tragic fate of the Twenty Palaces series. The books gathered critical accolades, high Amazon.com rankings, and a blurb from the prince of urban fantasy, Jim Butcher himself. However, after the third novel in the series, Circle of Enemies, the series was cancelled by Del Rey due to underperforming sales. Harry Connolly had a fourth novel — a prequel exploring Ray Lily’s introduction to the bloody world of the Twenty Palaces society — already written. Rather than allowing it to be consigned to the bottom drawer of his dresser, the deepest recesses of his hard drive, or the bottom of the Hudson River, Connolly did the world a favor and produced it as a self-published e-book.

I’ll be writing reviews of the second and third volumes in the series (watch this space!); but for this week, I wanted to look at that prequel, Twenty Palaces, for three reasons. First, sales of this book will put more money in the author’s pocket than sales of remaining copies of the other books, and I’m a big enough Connolly fan to think his labors deserve it. Second, if you’d like to give the books a shot, but are too profoundly avaricious to lay down $7.99 for Child of Fire, you’ll be delighted to learn that Twenty Palaces is available on Kindle and Nook for the fantastically low price of $2.99, payable in one easy installment. Third, it’s a good book.

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Sean T. M. Stiennon Reviews Child of Fire

Sean T. M. Stiennon Reviews Child of Fire

Child of FireChild of Fire
Harry Connolly
Del Rey (357 pages, mass market first edition September 2009, $7.99)

When we first meet Ray Lily, he’s in unpleasant circumstances. He’s less than 48 hours out of prison, driving a junker van through a Seattle rainstorm, and serving as chauffer to a boss who a.) is a powerful sorcerer, b.) wants to see him dead at the first possible opportunity, and c.) is paying him a wage of zero dollars per hour. Ten minutes after we meet him, he’s watched a boy die in front of his parents by exploding into sorcerous flame and melting into a swarm of silver worms. And then he’s watched the boy’s parents immediately forget they ever had a son, and drive away only vaguely confused.

It only goes downhill from there.

Child of Fire is a dark book. Sometimes shockingly, disturbingly dark, as is apparent right from the opening. That said, it’s also hugely entertaining, with noir-styled prose, a likeable narrator, and one of the most imaginative and horrifying monstrous adversaries I’ve ever encountered in fiction of any medium.

Our hero, Ray Lily, narrates the book in first person, and he bears comparison to hardboiled heroes like Philip Marlowe and Archie Goodwin, as well as the fantasy genre’s own Harry Dresden. He’s not quite as, well, heroic as Harry, though.  He’s a criminal, recently out of a prison sentence that came at the tail end of a car-jacking career in L.A. county, and he still has a tendency to sort everyone he meets into two categories: victim and dominant.

But mysterious circumstances surrounding the death of his childhood friend have pulled him into the shadowy world of the Twenty Palaces, a league of sorcerers formed to protect the secrets of magic from outsiders and to hunt down the supernatural entities known only as “predators.” These are hungry creatures from an extra-dimensional world called the Empty Spaces, who exist in a constant state of hunger. When summoned to our world, they can offer terrible power in return for a chance to sate that hunger on humans.

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Sean T. M. Stiennon reviews The Black Prism

Sean T. M. Stiennon reviews The Black Prism

How could I have ever doubted this cover, this beard?
How could I have ever doubted this cover, this beard?

The Black Prism
Brent Weeks
Orbit Books (640 pages, hardcover first edition August 2010, $25.99)

I’ll admit that, if I hadn’t already devoured Brent Weeks’s Night Angel novels, I probably wouldn’t have picked up The Black Prism (despite the cool, shadowy cover of a man in a magnificent goatee brandishing a mirror-polished blade).  The reason for that is a shallow one: The magic system sounded stupid. It is, in short, rainbow magic, sorcery based on splitting white light into one or more of its component colors to create a magical effect. But the Night Angel books were awesome, and I gave Weeks a chance to impress me again.  It took me ten pages to be thoroughly hooked on his story, and another hundred pages to be sold on his unique approach to magic.

In the world of the Seven Satrapies, trained drafters can draw color out of appropriately shaded objects (or white light viewed through a tinted lens) and draw it into their bodies to create a substance called luxin.  The properties of luxin differ dramatically based on its color: Red luxin is a hyper-flammable jelly, while super-violet luxin (just above the visible spectrum for most people) is as light and strong as spider-silk.  Each color also carries with it a particular emotional state that overtakes the person drafting it.  Green is wild and impetuous, orange slick and dissimulating.  It’s a simple idea with complex uses, both for war and for technology, and the applications Weeks finds for various kinds of luxin are a big part of the The Black Prism’s unique appeal.

Monochromes draft one color, and represent the majority.  Bichromes, the elite among drafters, have access to two, usually contiguous on the color spectrum (i.e., red and orange), and a small handful are polychromes, commanding three or four.  Only one man — the Prism — can split light into all seven stable colors, and he is regarded as high priest of the one god Orholam, the source of all light.  When there is imbalance in the world caused by one color being drafted more than another, it is his vocation to correct it.

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Of Blood and Honey by Stina Leicht

Of Blood and Honey by Stina Leicht

of-blood-and-honey-by-stina-leicth-adoiOf Blood and Honey
By Stina Leicht
Night Shade Books ($14.99, trade paperback, 296 pages, January 2011)
Reviewed by Sean T. M. Stiennon

Perhaps I’ll be accused of going below the belt by saying this, but the most damning criticism I can offer of Stina Leicht’s Of Blood and Honey is that it took me several weeks of intermittent reading to finish.  It’s not an awful book by any means, but I never felt as though it generated enough momentum or sympathy to pull me from one reading session to another.

But let me discuss what I did like, which is quite a bit.  Although Leicht is ultimately writing a tale of faeries, demons, and inquisitors, she opts for a clean, modern style that’s well in keeping with the setting in 1970s Ireland.  The sentences flow smoothly from paragraph to paragraph and page to page.  There are some nice snatches of dialogue which, to me at least, rang as distinctly Irish: “It’s married I am, and it’s married I’ll stay.”  Leicht never resorts to spelling out accents, instead relying on vocabulary and syntax to convey dialect, which is a far higher and finer art.

The picture the book paints is rather grim, but ultimately I thought the book came through strongest on atmosphere and milieu.  I know very nearly jack-squat about the Troubles (my ancestors left Ireland much earlier, more around the time of the Potato Famine), but the sense of constant fear and persecution Leicht evokes is powerful.

She tells the story of Liam, a young man who has never known any father besides his step-father Patrick.  His mother tells him that he’s the product of her forbidden union with a Protestant, but Liam has always suspected that there’s something more alien about his origins.

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Sean Stiennon Reviews Dark Jenny

Sean Stiennon Reviews Dark Jenny

darkjennyDark Jenny
Alex Bledsoe
Tor ($14.99, trade paperback, 352 pages, April 2011)
Reviewed by Sean T. M. Stiennon

Readers new to Alex Bledsoe’s Eddie LaCrosse series should brace themselves for culture shock, because while the book is set in a medieval world, all the characters have distinctly un-medieval names and mannerisms.  Be prepared for Gary, Eddie, Liz, and Angie to appear in the first few pages.  In keeping with their anachronistic names, all the characters speak in a modern conversational style.  Swords are referred to by make and model, like cars.

It’s a dramatic choice on Bledsoe’s part that will leave many readers feeling alienated, but I think it works.  The novels are hard-boiled crime fiction just as much as they are fantasy, and the casual style means that Bledsoe can give his hero Eddie a dry wit that requires no translation to be funny.  It also gives the story a freshness that the setting, which is your stand low-fantasy budget medieval, tends to lack.

For my part, I found that once I got past the anachronisms (first in The Sword-Edged Blonde, now in Dark Jenny), I was thoroughly captivated by the raw strength of Bledsoe’s writing and story-telling, and found myself with a book that seemed to stick to my fingers.

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Sean T. M. Stiennon reviews Warhammer: Bloodforged

Sean T. M. Stiennon reviews Warhammer: Bloodforged

Bloodforged
Nathan Longbloodforged
Black Library (416 pages, mass market first edition May 2011)
Reviewed by Sean T. M. Stiennon

Apart from walk-ons, cameos, and bit-parts, every single character in Bloodforged is either a daemon worshiper or a vampire.  That’s really the most concise way I can summarize the novel, and your reaction to that ought to be a pretty good indication of how much you’d like Bloodforged.

Ulrika was the daughter of a family of noble warriors before her rising as a vampire, and she finds herself chafing under the restrictions that her loyalty to the Lahmian sisterhood of Nuln imposes on her.  She flees her vampiric mother and travels north, to the Kislevite city of Praag, hoping to make herself useful to humanity by aiding them in the battle against the Chaos horde besieging the city.  However, Ulrika arrives to find that, not only is the city enjoying relative peace (“peace” being a term fundamentally alien to the Warhammer world), but Praag offers her no true refuge from her undead life.  Her former companions have moved on to new horizons, and she can have no real friendship with humans.

Ulrika finds fresh meaning to her unlife only when she stumbles across a secretive Chaos cult which is kidnapping girls off the streets.  At the same time, the local branch of the Lahmian vampires offers her a choice: Either be bound to them, and returned to the same life of servitude she left in Nuln, or die by their hands.  Ulrika is forced to navigate a narrow line between Chaos sorcery and Lahmian vindictiveness.  Her only clear ally is a dashing young vamp named Stefan, who claims to be out for revenge against his master’s killer, but may be hiding a more sinister motive, even as he introduces her to love beyond the grave.

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