#Blogtour #Review - The Ballad of Perilous Graves by Alex Jennings

The Ballad of Perilous Graves

Alex Jennings

Orbit, 23 June 2022

Available as: PB, e, audio CD

Source: Advance copy

ISBN(PB): 9780356519241

I'm grateful to Nazia at Orbit for an advance e copy of The Ballad of Perilous Graves to consider for review, and to Tracy at Compulsive Readers for inviting me to take part in the book's blogtour.

The Ballad of Perilous Graves takes us to Nola, a city where the incredible happens every day. 

Skycars will carry you around town; you can eat in a bar and diner occupying the remains of a UFO crash-landed in a lake; graffiti tags float through the streets, with hallucinogenic properties should you let then drift through you. 

And supernatural guardian spirit of the city, Doctor Professor, may materialise at any time with his piano, the Mess Around, playing music that you just have to dance to.

This is the home of kids Perilous Graves (Perry), his sister Brendoline (Brendy) and their best friend, Peaches. Peaches, who is super strong, lives alone in an abandoned house together with her collection of rescued animals. Peaches (who Perry has a bit of a thing for) doesn't attend school. Perry and Brendy do -  though Perry's recently moved schools, desperate to avoid magical studies that might bring him to the attention of the fearsome Hanging Judge.

We are then in a fantastical world right from the start, as Peaches calls on her friends to assist her in a quest, Perry and Brendy suffer a loss, and Doctor Professor reports the theft of nine songs that keep Nola in order. Their actions will the shape the future of the city, bringing them up against the spirit of the Storm that perpetually threatens Nola. Also involved with this will be Casey, a young trans man who's investigating the disappearance of his cousin, Jaylon. Casey's presence in the story makes this much more than a tale of some kids having a magical adventure - his history and life make events here seem very current and his reflections on his identity mesh with the complex nature of the city itself, which in some respects is divided, as well as being menaced by that external threat, the Storm

I need to be careful about spoilers here, because there are aspects of the story which it deliberately does NOT spell out and referring to them too clearly would take away some of those "aha" moments when you spot what's going on. So I won't say exactly how Casey, and Jaylon's, involvement relates to Perry, Peaches and Brendy's story. You need to unpick this for yourself, as the timeframe and location move back and forward, the flashbacks filling in, especially, Casey's background - and finally leading up to a realisation that made me go back and re-read some parts of the book. Casey's identity is key here and his story - and its evolution - is I think a reflection in one person of points Jennings is trying to convey about Nola/ New Orleans more widely. 

(And sorry if that reads as an entry for Pseud's Corner. Just read the book!)

In short, what we have here is an exciting fantasy adventure, as Peaches, Perry and Brendy confront one threat after another, including gangsters made into songs, songs that come to life, the increasingly unstable nature of the city, and the dawning realisation that the adults around them don't have all the answers and indeed may themselves simply be kids putting on a good act. Even the revered Doctor Professor himself may let them down, and no-one is guaranteed a happy ending - as Perry and Brenda's mum realises when she knows how much danger they are getting into. (Rereading this review, I spotted that my autocorrect turned that into "how much dance they are getting into" - which would actually have worked just as well for this book, I think!)

At the same time, we're exploring Casey's life and history - and the remarkable city of Nola/ New Orleans, which is so powerfully realised (and, I'd say, so loved, with all its faults) that it more or less steps up and performs as another character here. The heart of the story is very much rooted in actual history and in actual places and their relationships. Jennings has such a capacity for writing, for language and dialogue, and creates such a vivid, atmospheric and, well, accelerating, narrative, that the story just draws in the reader. Yes, especially at the start he throws a lot at you, he glories in the Nola dialect, which will not be familiar to all, and there are those things which only emerge slowly.  But if you feel overwhelmed, just go with it. As the pace picks up, things begin to knit together and it all makes sense (even all those characters who have lost one eye, as though Odin walked amongst us...)

For more information about The Ballad of Perilous Graves, see the Orbit website here. And do read the other stops on the tours - see the poster below for details!

You can buy The Ballad of Perilous Graves from your local bookshop, or get it online from Bookshop UK, Hive Books, Blackwells, Foyle's, WH Smith, Waterstones or Amazon

Review - Gather the Fortunes by Bryan Camp

Cover by Julia Lloyd

Gather the Fortunes (Crescent City, 2)
Bryan Camp
Titan, 21 May 2019
PB, 599pp

I'm grateful to Titan Books for a free copy of Gather the Fortunes for review.

This is the second book in Camp's Crescent City series of urban fantasy set in a post Katrina New Orleans. Several years have padded since the events of The City of Lost Fortunes, and while the scars of the hurricane - and the subsequent neglect - have perhaps healed a bit, they haven't faded. In these books, there is a palpable sense of injustice, with racial, gender and economic inequalities bleeding into a palpable sense of supernatural evil. Escapist fantasy they certainly aren't.

Gather the Fortunes isn't a straight followup, it largely doesn't feature the main protagonist of Lost Fortunes, Jude Dubuisson, a card sharp and street hustler who rose in that book to become the Trickster God of New Orleans. In what I'm sure is a wise decision, the new book instead follows another character, Renaissance Raines ("Renai") who featured in the earlier book ("briefly", according to the press notice that came with the book - I'll return to that in a moment).

The reason I think this is a good approach, and one that could usefully be followed more often, is that a second book about the same character so often becomes a recapitulation of the earlier story. Jude grew and changed in that book: fun though he is, it's better to leave him to the world he's joined and discover more about somebody else. And Renai is a fascinating character. Having died and been resurrected in The City of Lost Fortunes, she's now become a psychopomp - an intermediary guiding the souls of the dead on their journey to... wherever.  The challenges posed by her new life feature strongly - living in our world, but not part of it, alive and human but tending not to be noticed by other people unless she interacts VERY DIRECTLY (maybe a metaphor for being female?) and most of all, having to avoid her family - because to them, she is dead.

There are also less tangible issues: lack of memory of certain events, a growing unease at the part she's playing in the whole supernatural ecology, above all, perhaps, the unending cycle of abuse, discrimination and cruelty to which she has a ringside seat. That's symbolised by her latest assignment - which goes drastically wrong - the collection of a young Black man, who is to be killed in a drive-by shooting. Reno's - and her wise talking partner, Sal - lives (if I can use the word?) will be turned upside down by the consequences of this, having to embark on a desperate chase around New Orleans - and its many analogues in various heavens and hells - to discover what has gone wrong, before the time known as the Hallows comes and all the gates between the worlds are openend...

Moving the story on to another character allows Camp to develop his strange, syncretistic fantasy world, overlaying religions, superstitions and belief systems and motivating plot by the similarities and differences between them - so that Egyptian deities morph into Voodoo gods which echo Central European folktales - all intercut with myths, and articles of faith from the Internet age. The geography of world Renai navigates with her departed souls is shaped by all this, impacted by human beliefs and so inevitably etched also by long standing wrongs, oppressions and disparities. Because those, too, arise from human beliefs. It's far from being a simplistic world where the dead are judged for the good and evil they did. There are continuing factions and interests and many of the gods have contrasting - indeed violently clashing - aspects. This is of course where an avowed Trickster like Jude was very much at home, grifting his way from scene to scene. Renai has, it soon becomes clear, much more moral freight to her and so the rights and wrongs of what's going on are held up to more scrutiny. And I don't actually think she was as slight a figure in The City of Lost Fortunes as that press notice suggests - indeed, judging by what we see here I wonder if Renaissance Raines might be the central figure of this sequence of books?

It may contradict what I've said above (I am vast, I contain multitudes...) but I'd welcome more of Ms Raines in a further Crescent City book. Unlike Jude, she doesn't seem likely to settle down for long in the role allotted to her by the Thrones, and I wonder if we'll see more of a War in Heaven in future?

A satisfying, dense and fun sequel to The City of Lost Fortunes which left me wanting more.

For more about the book, see the publisher's webpage here.

To buy it, try your local bookshop, including via Hive, or Blackwell's, Waterstones or Amazon.

Review - The City of Lost Fortunes

Design by Julia Lloyd

The City of Lost Fortunes
Bryan Camp
Titan Books, 17 April 2017
PB, 477pp

I'm grateful to the publisher for a copy of The City of Lost Fortunes.

Post–Katrina New Orleans is a place haunted by its history and by the hurricane’s destruction. Street magician Jude Dubuisson is likewise burdened by his past and by the storm, because he has a secret: the magical ability to find lost things, a gift passed down to him by the father he has never known...

A delightful, syncretistic mash-up of urban fantasy, mystery and redemption, The City of Lost Fortunes explores the health and secret life of New Orleans. Set six years after Katrina devastated the city, the hurricane and the ham-fisted emergency response dominate the book, with houses still showing the ghostly "X" that indicated they had been searched for survivors and with a psychic hangover, too: the event robbed the city of its Luck, its Voice and its Magician - not at once, but in the lingering aftershock of the crisis.

Without them, it is vulnerable in so many ways.

None of this matters to Jude Dubuisson, ex apprentice magician, potential demigod, and general fixer for the mysterious Mr Mourning. He want to put the whole thing behind him. Little problem there: Katrina did something to his magic, laying him open to its effects as never before, and now he spends most of his time trying to bleed it out with as little pain as he can.

So he's not best pleased to receive a summons from Mourning - but you don't ignore Mr Mourning...

Thus begins a rampaging quest taking in tarot, religious symbolism, magic, fate, the gods, an angel, a vampire, Jude's eccentric mother and much, much more. Through it, Camp shows a mastery of the city - its music, religious traditions, history, food and culture. Jude lives and breathes those things and through him, Camp shows them to us. If you ever wanted a tribute to a living, breathing city, it's here.

And there's more. Each section begins with a potted summary of an aspect of religion, piling on the contrasts and similarities between traditions drawn from across the world - because all traditions find themselves in New Orleans. It will be Jude's task to navigate through the alternatives and paradoxes as he pursues his own quest.

Exactly what that quest is, what's really going on, the actual stakes for which the game is being played - and who is playing it - only emerges slowly, at times frustratingly slowly. There were moments when I didn't completely follow Jude's or the narrator's reasoning about what was going on. I'm not sure whether that was intentional - there's noting wrong with maintaining a mystery until the right time -  or whether I was misunderstanding stuff I was meant to have got, but either way the effect was to pace the story very well, keeping a great deal in play till the very end while revealing some important, more personal, history about Jude as the story proceeds.

The book is, I think, in the end a celebration of New Orleans - what is has been, what it is, what it can be - as well as an inditement of what has been done to it: there are plenty of sharp-eyed opportunists here who want a slice of the city's body for their own uses, and unprotected, she's ripe for the plunder.

The fact that it all works both on that level, and as urban fantasy, is a credit to Camp's writing and the themes he explores mean that his postscript setting out the origins of the story is genuinely enlightening and informative.

All in all an epic, compulsive read and a rather unusual addition to the canon of urban fantasy.

For more about the book, see the publisher's website here.