Review - The Undercutting of Rosie and Adam

The Undercutting of Rosie and Adam

Megan Bannen
Orbit, 8 July 2025
Available as: PB, 388pp audio, e   
Source: Advance copy
ISBN(PB): 9780356521947

I'm grateful to Orbit for sending me a copy of The Undercutting of Rosie and Adam to consider for review.

This, the third and I think final (pity!) of Bannen's fantasy Western romances, revolves around Tanrian Marshal Rosie Fox (who is also a demigod, and therefore immortal) and haughty, aloof inventor Dr Adam Lee, the man who invented the portals that give access to the magic-touched world of Tanria.

Always a bit error-prone, as we've seen before, now the portals seem to be failing completely, and Rosie and Adam may hold the key to restoring them. It's a shame that something - oh, say, unresolved romantic tension - is stopping them working together smoothly...

The Undercutting of Rosie and Adam is, I think, the best book yet in this series (which is saying something, given how good The Undertaking of Hart and Mercy and The Undermining of Twyla and Frank were). Not only is there full-blooded, smouldering romance between Rosie and Adam, but Rosie's difficult backstory is sensitively shown. Just imagine being a demigod, daughter of a good-for-nothing trickster god and a sentimental but mortal mother. The passage of time means you'll lose anyone you ever get close to - first, your adored parent, then any lover, friend or colleague, all will go the same way. Apart from that abandoning father who always turn up just when he's not wanted.

Bannen has taken care to give this world, the archipelago of the Federated Islands of Cadmus and its surrounding continents, a true sense of reality and a history and culture - the last hundred years, which Rosie recalls, have seen development so that her memories of her early life with her mum have a sepia tinge, a kind of fin de siècle quality that evokes well both the rose tinted view we often have of childhood, and the quainter pleasures of a more gilded age to which modern day Cadmus looks back wistfully.

If Rosie's missing her mum, who died decades ago, she she's resentful of her dad, not least as she blames him for the grinding poverty in which she grew up (well, he is a Trickster).

This book is I think the most unapologetically "fantasy" of Bannen's three stories. As with Cadmus, she's so far sketched in and shown the mythological background to her works, and there have been a few divine or semi divine traces, but in The Undercutting of Rosie and Adam reality, at least in Tanria, begins to shift and it's all traceable to the doings of the gods and powers. There are obscure rules in play, debts and prices have been incurred, and Rosie's about to have to deal with the consequences, even though they're not her fault. As if her complex love life, and her difficult relationship with her boss weren't enough (each time Rosie dies on duty it's such a pain for her boss! Think of the paperwork and the H&S issues!)

At the same time it's thoroughgoing romance as the two bickering protagonists are forced together in a chi-chi rural destination retreat, albeit with some unwelcome colleagues for company. Unless they can work out what's gone wrong with the portals, none of them will ever get out!

All in all, great fun, with an ending I didn't see coming. I will be sad to have to leave Cadmus (though, hopeful to find my way back there one day).

Finally, now the sequence is finished, I'd just like to give credit to Lisa Maria Pompilio for her beautiful covers. Just look at them next to each other and you'll see a pattern - a brilliant interpretation of the themes of the books.

Hoping for more like this from Orbit!

For more information about The Undercutting of Rosie and Adam, see the publisher's website here. 

Review - For the Road by Stark Holborn

For the Road

Stark Holborn
PS Publishing/ Absinthe Books, August 2025
Available as: HB, 62pp, e   
Source: Advance e-copy
ISBN(HB): 9781803945286

I'm grateful to the author for giving me access to an advance e-copy of For the Road to consider for review.

In the tradition of the gritty Western, Jesse Bartos is running - from what, from whom, to where are unclear, possibly as much to him as to the reader. Jumping from a train, clutching the precious suitcase he daren't open, he ends up stranded at a dusty railroad halt miles from nowhere. A place where the train never comes, the tracks silt over with dust. Where everything is faded, broken or despairing.

There is I think a powerful melancholy to places like Dawn's Holt, places where people only come to be somewhere else. Get stuck there and you may lose yourself, like the body buried at the crossroads whose ghost doesn't know which way to turn. All the imagery here is of death, of letting go, of being carried away - from the dust which sweeps into every corner, to the scraggy hens laying their sulphurous, inedible eggs to the motorcycle gang that periodically threatens to sweep Jesse away. (Would that be to lose himself further? Or a redemption, a way out? Clues are scant.)

Is Jesse going to die? Does he want to? Can he save himself, either by riding away with the biker gang, finally catching the train - or staying put, making a life with Reo, the son of the family living at the station house, who captivates Jesse.

Holborn's writing here blends the Western and the mythological, the strange tales and origin stories of the little family echoing heroic legends of birth and creation from the elements. How come they are here, in the desolate station? Why are they engaged in a losing fight against the ruling powers and principalities, one with which Jesse's fate - and perhaps his own history - are entangled?

A powerful story of sense and feeling, For the Road systematically anatomises a life and portrays a young man who has, though misfortune, come to a turning point, a junction (or, as I said, a crossroads) where things may go different ways. Dawn's Holt (not "halt" - a "holt" is a refuge...) provides Jesse with a little respite, but not much, a time in which choices can be made. This short book shows which ones he selects, and why. It's powerful, concentrated and enthralling, a book to be inhaled as much as read, and then to be considered and turned over after.

Recommended.

For more information about For the Road, and to buy the book, see the publisher's website here. 

Review - Triggernometry Finals by Stark Holborn

Triggernometry Finals

Stark Holborn (illustrated by Philip Harris)

Rattleback Books, 4 February 2025
Available as: e, print length 63pp   
Source: advance copy
ASIN: B0DT6S5PW5

I'm grateful to the author for sending me a copy of Triggernometry Finals to consider for review.

As the title may suggest this is the final book in the Triggernometry sequence, following Triggernometry and Advanced Triggernometry, showing us the ultimate fate of  Professor “Mad” Malago Browne and her desperate associates in an alt-West where academics in general, but especially mathematicians, have been persecuted and banished, knowledge trampled down, and ignorance exalted. Any resemblance to the present day is I'd conjecture, purely intentional, especially in the glimpse we're give at the start of the book of how this state of affairs originated.

Anyway, as the story opens, things are more perilous than ever, with the forces of the Capitol closing in and our little band of reluctant "math" heroes losing one of its leading analysts. It seems only one desperate, last play remains to them...

As in the other books, the writing here is great fun, Holborn clearly combining mathematics with the genre of the Western so that geometrical instruments, solutions to equations, and infinite series (among other things) are weaponised and deployed among guns and dynamite to make mayhem. There are gunfights in bars, parched desert and lawless towns where Browne's face appears on "Wanted" posters. The atmosphere of violence reminds us of the underlying concerns that Browne had in the first book when she was, you may remember, lying low not only from fear for her life but from disgust at the destruction her field had wrought and which was part of its downfall.

We are though beyond that ambiguity now, with various mathematical heroes brought out of the pages of journals and assembled in one company, ready to take on the forces of reaction and darkness. Their presence in one time and place may be anachronistic but it works, Holborn infusing each with a recognisable character that reflects their body of work. Taken as a whole they do of course show how any academic discipline evolves in dialogue with its past. 

It's a swift moving story, with plenty of darkness and fear as to how things might turn out, and some shocking twists. The Capitol has its way of suborning the "mathmos" - gold talks, and can everyone really be trusted?

A suitable, and enjoyable, conclusion to this fast-shooting series, one which keeps all the plates spinning right to the end and then, as it were, shoots them all down with one fantastic trick shot. Strongly recommended.

For more information about Triggernometry Finals, or to purchase it, see the author's website here.

#Review - Ninth Life by Stark Holborn

Ninth Life (Factus Sequence, 3)

Stark Holborn
Titan Books, 23 July 
Available as: PB, 416pp audio, e   
Source: Advance e-copy
ISBN(PB): 9781803362984

I'm grateful to the author and publisher for giving me access to an advance e-copy of Ninth Life to consider for review.

Ninth Life is a return to the universe of Ten Low and of Hel's Eight - a future dominated by the militaristic Accord, which ruthlessly exploits its colony planets for raw materials, assisted by various warlords, gangster capitalist federations and oligarchs. Opposition has arisen on the mysterious but especially harsh world of Factus with its spirits, the probability-bending Ifs, who are able - sometimes - to turn likelihood on its head. Also featuring are the Seekers, with their semi-religious trade in organs and blood.

Ninth Life follows the career of ex General Gabriella Ortiz, originally a child soldier and a former hero of the Accord. Gabi featured in the earlier books, and her arrival, dragged from the wreck of a crashed spacecraft, nods to that. Here, though, her story is given in full - although it's contradictory to say that because as the narrator of Ninth Life makes clear, he has limited, uncertain sources and somebody is trying to erase his work.

Military Proctor Idrisi Blake himself is as much a character here as Gabi. We see his understanding of, and sympathy with, the former general turned pirate and rebel develop as his researches proceed. The framing is complex, with at least two different timelines for Gabi and numerous witnesses and accounts used to substantiate her career, but it's made more so by a fourth wall breaking effect where she seems at times to be directly addressing Blake. Failing to heed the often repeated instruction not to listen to her, Blake falls more and more under Gabi's spell, as do most of those she encounters and as, I am sure, will most readers.

Yet Gabi remains something of a mystery. Through a series of battles, fights, escapes, downfalls, injuries and betrayals we learn a lot about her origins, motivation and fears - but less about her intentions. Hers has been a life with loss (you'll know that if you've read the previous books) and she's suffered both betrayal and failure, but even so, everywhere she goes, everything she does, seems to align with some unstated purpose. It's less than clear how far she knows and understands this herself (the asides to Blake suggest that she does) and how far she is is actively cooperating with it or how much she is being drawn along. The best I can put it is, the Ifs, who are an important part of this story, will offer their help but only on their own terms, and there is a cost. Gabi is clearly paying that price, but we don't know - and I don't think she does - how far she is being given fair weight in exchange for her coin.

All in all a heart-pounding and exciting story with a core of steel. As ever Stark Holborn is superlative in bringing alive these actively hostile, dead-end-of-the-galaxy locations, places which make each day's survival a heroic act and every character, therefore, a hero. They're like the desert environs of the typical Western raised to the power 100.  That will be familiar from the earlier books, but the story has now expanded beyond that Western-in-Space metaphor to a whole new level of weird, anarchic, punkiness that is just a glory to read.

I'm not sure if there will be more in this series - the ending is I think deliberately unclear - but if there are I will be delighted. Holborn's books provide something - a spice, a feistiness - which, while impossible to pin down, is I think unique in current SF and which I just can't get enough of.

For more information about Ninth Life, see the publisher's website here.

#Review - Hel's Eight by Stark Holborn

Hel's Eight
Stark Holborn
Titan Books, 21 March 2023

Available as: PB, 353pp, e
Source: Advance copy
ISBN(PB): 9781803362298

I'm grateful to the author for sending me a copy of Hel's Eight to consider for review.

One day older and deeper in debt...

Taking place in the same setting as Ten Low, Hel's Eight picks up the story a few years later with ex-convict "Doc" Ten living in a shack in the forsaken wastes of the moon Factus.

As soon becomes clear, Ten isn't out there for her own good. She is doing what she can to treat the desperate people who scratch a living in the dust, trying to level the score, to atone for the great wrong she believes she did. And by living in isolation, accompanied only by her battered robot dog Rowdy, she hopes to avoid bringing down further trouble on anyone else. She's cut herself off from such friends and acquaintances as she still has, including her sometime lover Silas. 

Then one day, the past comes knocking on Ten's door. A showdown is looming with the acquisitive Xoon Futures corporation, which seems to have money - or at least, company tokens - to throw around and which has been muscling in on Factus, threatening the fragile lives and fragile independence of its inhabitants.  You'd think Factus a place so wretched and perhaps cursed that surely anyone sane would stay far away. We saw in the previous book how the moon is haunted by the bizarre Ifs - generally referred to in superstitious areas as just "They". They might be fates, gods or who knows what but They seem able to surf the possibilities of the future, feeding off the alternates. It seems now that Ten may have unfinished business with Them - or They with her - but others may now have learned that and have plans to make use of her. So Ten has to decide whether to listen to the call and come back for one last adventure...

As Ten struggles with that dilemma, we are given additional context about Factus through diary entries written decades earlier by 'Pec "Eight" Esterházy', a convict who came to Factus and whose fate may explain a little of what is going on. 

Ten is a fascinating and complex character who has lived a fascinating and complex life. One senses the tension in her, the regret at what she's done, the fear of what it may do to her, but also her desire to protect and to rescue the inhabitants of Factus from a grim choice between a grinding existence and ownership by Xoon. In this remote part of space (on the edge of 'the Void') those endless alternate outcomes that feed Them seem to be opposed by a commercial monoculture in which everything and everyone is owned and controlled. What play of possibilities can there be in that, what freedom?

It's just brilliant how Holborn takes the tyranny embodied by the "company town" and dials it up to, oh, twenty three or something, weaving it into a truly existential, spiritual menace that is only heightened because out here on the edge, there is nobody to ride to the rescue.

That concept is sharpened by the obvious fun that Holborn is having here with a setting that while firmly futuristic and more than a little bit weird, also echoes there classic Western - transport by some sort of vehicle referred to as a "mule", dusty, dead-end towns and trading-posts, abandoned mines and the gangs of 'Road Agents'. 

I just loved this book, equal parts horror, Western and SF (and some other things too) and fully, gloriously itself, its own twisted, wonderful thing, an absorbing read and a truly distinctive one.

For more information about Hel's Eight, see the publisher's website here.

#Review - Undercover by Tamsin Muir

Undercover (Into Shadow Collection, 5)
Tamsyn Muir
Amazon Original Stories, 15 November 2022

Available as: e, audio

Source: purchased

ASIN (e): B0BGQ5ZCMD

I love genre mash-ups, even more those that are not simple mash=ups but which play with elements of style and with settings and archetypal characters to create something genuinely new. And I've loved Tamsin Muir's Locked tomb trilogy. 

So I wasn't surprised to be delighted by this long-short story, which sees a woman of mystery -Starr - taking a job as bodyguard to a gangster known as The Widower, all in a kind of weird-West setting where towns walk in a parched desert on monstrous mechanical legs and the undead have to be kept at bay.

It's with this last that Starr's expertise lies, and she pretty soon upbraids her employer for taking dangerous risks with Lucille, a burlesque dancer but also something much more dangerous. In a book where everybody is on their guard and clearly, more is going on that we are told, it's fascinating to watch the players make their moves and to speculate on how it will all work out. As a meet-up with a rival gang looms and we are made party to some of the secrets play it's frankly anybody guess how things will turn out.

This is a pacy and entertaining story with an absorbing atmosphere and strong characters. I'd recommend it, and would like to read more set in this work.

For more information about Undercover or to buy the book, see the Amazon product page here. 

#Review - Advanced Triggernometry by Stark Holborn

Cover by Philip Harris

Advanced Triggernometry (Triggernomentry #2)
Stark Holborn
Rattleback Books, 8 April 2021
Available as: e-book
Source: e-book kindly supplied by the author

"The cash we stole dragged at our heels, bloody and guilty, but we didn't let it go. That's the problem with gold..."

A year ago, with Triggernometry, Holborn introduced a version of the Old West where practitioners of mathematics are outlawed - literally. In that book her outcast "mathmos", "mad" Malago Browne and her sidekick, Pierre Fermat, used their skills in advanced calculus and complex analysis to get an edge in every gunfight - not to mention the keen edges of their steel protractors, rulers and setsquares - and pulled off an audacious robbery. The Big One. The heist to end all heists. 

So as Advanced Triggernometry begins, we find Browne living as "Mrs Grey", apparently at peace, across the Border - as the way is, or was, in the Old West. 

She's teaching maths in a school, until one day three strangers arrive.

She should have stayed there...

Advanced Triggernometry is another riff on a classic Western theme - this time, the town defenceless against bandits. The three strangers want help. It's time for Browne to saddle up, ride out, and, accompanied by Dog, get the gang together agains.

It's all great fun, working on three levels (at least). First, on the surface, there are the classic locations, characters and situations: the mining camp, the saloon bar fight, the corrupt lawman, the climactic shootout. Then, we have the joy of seeing Holborn recast everything in a mathematical framework, having the fights won by a keen eye, a quick brain and a well deployed instrument. This carries through to the chapter names and headings and the background and character of the protagonists (who must surely be drawn from a Valhalla of the science - Holborn manages to have figures together who were born hundred or even thousands of years apart: even Archimedes makes an appearance).

Finally, there's a serious note in the way society has gone here. A little bit Fahrenheit 451, a little bit The Handmaid's Tale, but wholly its own thing, the depiction of a nation where the Capitol has manipulated prejudice and greed to turn people away from learning and enlightenment is... not that far from reality, in some respects. And its fitting that the response, as depicted here, is to seek solidarity and mutual protection from the bullies.

The writing is sharp and authentic for the genre ('Noches was named for its trade: night pursuits, fuelled by liquor and as many bad decisions as could be crammed into ten hours of darkness', 'People began to emerge from the houses, their eyes guarded, words of welcome locked behind their teeth') but at the same time full of great mathematical in-jokes ('Évariste Galois. Careful of him. He's young, but he's a trouble-maker. Obsessed with radicals.') and in places Holborn both manages to hit a reference or work in a quote and to make her writing deeply moving.

To summarise, whole short, Advanced Triggernometry entertains throughout. It's a fun read, and raises some serious issues. I'd recommend.  

You can pre-order Advanced Triggernometry from Amazon for Kindle here. 

Stark Holborn's website is here.

Review - Triggernometry by Stark Holborn

Cover by Philip Harris

Triggernometry
Stark Holborn
Rattleback Books, 8 April 2008
e-book, 62pp

I'm grateful to Stark Holborn for a free advance copy of Triggernometry to consider for review.

I knew Holborn as the author of Nunslinger, an excellent alt-Western which I reviewed here.

Now Holborn is back with a novel that packs the punch of an even alt-ier story. Again all the Western touchstones are there - the wilderness, the railroads as lifelines, Frontier (lack of) justice, the protagonist who wants to put the past behind - and the past that won't be so put.

But here there is an exotic spin to the whole thing. This is a world, or at least an America, where mathematics and mathematicians are reviled, feared. They are the despised "maths" with prices on their heads, sometimes tolerated - just - for useful skills but only if those skills can be cloaked in some polite fiction, or hawked at dead of night, which is where we meet "Mad” Malago Browne and her sidekick, Pierre Fermat. Holborn has fun throughout introducing figures from the history of maths and, in Emmy Noether, physics. She generally paints them as a crew of hard-drinking, ruthless desperadoes, albeit fallen due to persecution rather than intent.

Of course there's a shootout.

Of course there are desperate nighttime rides.

Of course there's a loyal hound called, simply, Dog.

The central conceit is maintained very well: just why might maths be seen as dangerous? Holborn makes you believe that those instrument sets, those methods and solutions, may, indeed, in the wrong hands, constitute threats. Browne is deadly when she can find an angle, and she and Fermat are a formidable team. All the more pity, then, they had a falling out all those years back...

In a world of rough mining camps, ranches, anarchists, bank raids and posses, it all seems to make a lot of sense. The drive of the narrative, combined with Browne's bitterness through most of the book and her bickering with "Ferm", carries the reader along magnificently. In a relatively short book that relationship is central and Holborn conveys it very well - yes that love-hate thing between a pair of outlaws is another classic Western trope yet Holborn makes it into something slightly different, adding a wistfulness at the mathematical life that has been lost: at one stage Ferm whoops in delight when employing a particular clever technique to solve a problem and the book has that sense of infectious fun throughout.

A great read, whether you speak maths or not - if you do you'll spot some in-jokes and references as well as understanding the chapter heading equations, if you don't you'll still enjoy this fun and gripping story.

For more information about the book and to buy it, see the author's website here.

Review - Treason of Hawks by Lila Bowen

Cover design by Lauren Panepinto

Treason of Hawks (The Shadow, 4)
Lila Bowen (Delilah S Dawson)
Orbit, 18 October 2018
PB, 371pp

I bought my copy of this book from Waterstones in Oxford.

With Treason of Hawks, Bowen brings to a close a truly remarkable sequence of books. Starting with Wake of Vultures and continuing with Conspiracy of Ravens and Malice of Crows (links to my reviews of the earlier books), she has documented the story of, first, the girl Nettie Lonesome, an orphan living in virtual slavery on a ranch presided over by the drunken man she calls Pap and then of the man Rhett Walker, who is also The Shadow, avenger of wrongs and at times, a great bird. As the series has progressed we've seen Rhett grow and develop, take on new challenges and, most of all, fight - both to overcome the monsters that threaten him and his friends, and to own and transcend his own past

Most of all, he has struggled with his relationship with Sam, finally finding love and a sort of happiness - which was thrown into terrible jeopardy in Malice of Crows.

Set in the lawless wastes of Durango Territory, a sort-of version of the Wild West that would seem familiar if it wasn't crawling with vampires, Lobos, Chupacabras and even carnivorous rabbits, the books have taken Rhett on a bewildering tour of ranger outposts, rail camps, cursed towns and abandoned missions. It's a breathtaking world that Bowen creates (ably assisted by Tim Paul's glorious map), one full of wonders (some never explored in the books), terrors and riddles.

Treason of Hawks continues right where Malice of Crows left off with Sam bleeding to death and Rhett in despair. And that note of darkness continues with what is really nonstop action, Rhett seemingly at the mercy of a mysterious and implacable enemy, desperate to defend the little family that he has build up. In many ways I think this is the darkest of the books, Rhett having to confront not only the unexpected weakness of the Shadow to protect and guide him, and malice and strength of his opponent, but also his own nature.

Rhett has, though all his adventures, been fixated on the idea of manliness. He worries about what he, as a man, should do and tends to scorn women and girls (at one point in this book he more or less claims not to know about the daily things that need to be done to make the ranch work - mainly women's work). Here, that attitude is challenged, as is the alarmingly high casualty rate among those who follow him. Monsters they may be, invulnerable to most dangers, but immortal they;re not - and Rhett begins to lose people.

The result is that - not for the first time - he has to question everything: who he is, what he has been, his heritage as a Native person, his ability to defend those he loves. As everything seems to be going wrong, what can he hold onto?

I have loved this series and adored Rhett as a character, and it is painful to see what Bowen puts him though here. Authors truly are monsters! But what happens also feels right. Durango is a brutal crucible for a man - or for anyone - to be formed in, rife with injustice, with persecution of both the Native population and the monsters, with Rhett's beloved Durango Rangers far from being the angels of justice that he imagined. (In fact coming to terms with this fact is one of his biggest challenges). In the course of these books we've seen slavery, murder and torture and there is no tidy resolution to that  - the forces behind it are too big, too strong, for resistance.

But much can be done and the book does focus on the power of love, friendship and kindness even in the face of such evils. It is in the end a quietly triumphant story, despite the losses and tears.

I'd strongly recommend this series, if you haven't read them, and if you have I'm happy to be able to report that Bowen tales the series out on a real high.

The whole thing is a fabulous achievement and I'm so glad to have read these books.

Lila Bowen kindly answered some questions when the first two books were published in 2016. You can read the interview here.

Review - Malice of Crows by Lila Bowen

Image from www.orbitbooks.net

Malice of Crows (Shadow, 3)
Lila Bowen
Orbit, 2 November 2017
PB, 344pp

I'm grateful to the publisher for an advance copy of this book.

Following directly on from Wake of Vultures and Conspiracy of Ravens, Malice of Crows picks up Rhett Walker's story immediately after Conspiracy ends. He's defeated the necromancer Trevisan, who was using gruesome magic to control monsters like Rhett - ordinary men and women with the ability to transform into animals, both mundane and esoteric - and compel them to labour building his railroad.

Yes - Trevisan was defeated, but fleeing he possessed the body of six year old Meimei, sister to Cora the healer (who is able to become a dragon when she wishes). Now Rhett - in his persona as The Shadow, avenger of wrongs and slayer of what needs to be killed, must track down Trevisan and free Meimei. Thus the story is really one long chase through the barren wastes of Durango Territory, with Rhett's posse confronting ever more daunting threats (not going to give details because spoilers).

Walker is a Durango Ranger and proud of it. It's his identity, given to him by his beloved Captain. But we learn more in the course of this book about what that means. Rhett's pride in this status takes a hammering: it seems the Rangers aren't all he believed. Not just slayers of monsters, they are a weapon of the 'civilized' world, driving out the native people - and Rhett happens to be one of those himself. In many dialogues with Coyote Dan and his sister, Winifred, Rhett seeks to come to terms with who he is and what his destiny will be. In another sense, he is learning who he is from Sam. Beautiful, golden haired Sam, who he has loved since Rhett was called Nettie Lonesome. The story of Rhett and Sam gives the book a whole different dimension though there are some heart stopping moments when it seems Rhett may give away his former identity. What will happen if Sam discovers how old Monty, his (and Nettie/ Rhett's) former mentor, actually died?

There are secrets here, and complicated identities jostling against each other: in other hands it could all seem overcomplicated but Bowen (Delilah S Dawson) knows just what she's doing and she makes Rhett, Sam, Winifred, Cora, Earl so alive, and drives them along through such a pacy series of fights, flights, escapes and puzzles, that characters and story just leap from the page.

Gradually Rhett becomes more comfortable with his identities both as man and as monster. Bowen animates her story by making the 'outsiders' into so-called 'monsters' who are at the same time the most human of the characters. At one point a frustrated Rhett shouts out that he's 'unnatural': his friends help him see that isn't true at all. But Rhett is a monster and Trevisan, for all his necromancy and murder, isn't a 'monster', he remains just a man. Being able to pass in polite society, wield power and money and claim the protection of sheriffs - and Rangers - is no guarantee of a good heart.

I loved this book. As a continuation of Rhett's story it has the same epic storytelling as the earlier volumes, but I think it explores his personality more throughly and shows him growing. The book is proudly, obstinately diverse, on a number of different dimensions while at the same time being a sharply written, exciting and in some ways endearingly old-fashioned Western, albeit one set in a slightly parallel world with magic - and monsters - acknowledged. Whether you like action, fantasy, a bit of tender romance or just a well-written, entertaining story, you'll find them - and more - here.

The author very kindly answered some questions about the books for me last year - you can read what she said here.

Review - The Trials of Solomon Parker by Eric Scott Fischl

Image from www.angryrobotbooks.com

The Trials of Solomon Parker
Eric Scott Fischl
Angry Robot/ Tor, 3/5 October 2017
PB, e 400pp

I'm grateful to the publisher for an advance e-copy of this book via NetGalley.

Well.

We have something very new and strange here, I think.

While The Trials of Solomon Parker shares something with Fiscal's previous book, Dr Potter's Medicine Show - a Western setting, magic - there are also clear difference. This is a very political book, taking in, as it does, nascent Union organisation in the deadly mines of Butte, Montana ("Butte brings to mind nothing more than a rotting carcass, the hill burrowed out underneath, hollowed like a dead thing swarmed with carrion beetles, the stink of decay rising up"), the position of Native Americans, and collusion between organised crime and the company bosses.

There's also religion and philosophy.

It's a dizzying mix.

David Solomon Parker, the titular character, is at the centre of the vortex. A miner when we meet him, he has a troubled past with a marriage gone tragically wrong. His wife Elizabeth - who we see first, her story opens the book - suffers from what I think would now be called post-natal depression, and this leads to terrible events. Years later, Parker is underground, emerging only to sleep, drink and gamble away his pay. It's almost as though he is hiding from daylight.

There is - as the quote at the front hints - more than an element of the trials of Job here. Job, that upright man whom the Almighty and Satan toy with to see if he'll break. The man who loses everything, through no fault of his own. This theme - of divinities playing with mortals' lives - plays out through the book, the powers - the Above Ones - being vaguely identified as Native American gods, mediated with by an old sorcerer. He has plans for Sol, but also for Sol's best friend, "Billy", a Native man who was taken into a Government school that made him a "brown-skinned White man".

Perhaps the idea is that Billy will recover his heritage? It's not actually very clear. Wreathed about with myths and legends of the brothers Maatakssi and Siinatssi, a sort of Cain and Abel, and their dealings with the Above Ones, the story takes a kind of quantum jump to follow different alternatives. Again and again Solomon is presented with an opportunity to mend what's been broken, but that means overcoming his own failings - his drinking, his gambling - and also finding a way to live a moral life in the boomtown of Butte.

There are, it seems, many ways to live immorally in Butte...

Reminding me somewhat of Kate Atkinson's Life After Life, this story holds together the perspectives of the struggling miners - an important side plot is their attempt to improve safety standards in the mines - the crime boss and, of course, the Native Americans - two brothers and nephew/ son. Almost daunting in depictions of suffering and cruelty, it's nevertheless clear that these are not, quite, the point. Rather the book is - I think - a challenge to the idea of a happy ending, of achieving one state that resolves everyone's problems. Time and time again characters aim for such a state - Billy, in working at the mental hospital, doing what good he can, Sol, over and over again, even the union organiser Frank Little ("Thought it would be different, this time") - and of course Maatakssi and Siinatssi in the recounted legends. It's all about dicing with the gods, winning over them or cheating them, extracting a favour, a promise, a blessing.

It never quite seems to work, though. The House never loses. There are always loose ends which trip everyone up. Billy loses his friend. Sol encounters, or causes, tragedy after tragedy. Little himself is led to a lonely Calvary (he's a real person, it did happen). And in the myths, Maatakssi's attempt to redeem his tribe leads, in the end, to a catastrophe for them.

That leaves in doubt the outcome to the dramatic finale of the book - one wants to believe there has been some eucatastrophe, some healing, that things have finally gone right: but the real setting of the book in a specific time and place suggests it hasn't, at least not for Billy and his kin.

It's a visceral book, filled with the sights and sounds and, above all, smells of the squalid boomtown. Especially the smells. Everywhere there is smoke. Smoke drifting over from Idaho making Elizabeth's laundry stink even when it's washed. Smoke drifting through the mines, warning of ruinous fire. Sulphurous smoke from the works blanketing Butte. Smoke from cheap tobacco in the taverns and dives, smoke from expensive cigars in the crime boss's lair. Smoke from the sorcerer's fire, smoke from the burning house. Fischl makes it all very, very real, even as he's playing games with consequences, keeping us guessing about who is alive and who's dead. The book is a dream to read, and worth reading slowly, taking in the nuances and spotting the recurring themes: a prizefight, a scene replayed from a different perspective, an outcome the same, despite a changed starting point.

To summarise: I'd strongly recommend this book. It's deeper, darker and scarier than Dr Potter's Medicine Show - which was already deep, dark and scary.

Review: Dr Potter's Medicine Show

Image from http://www.angryrobotbooks.com/

Dr Potter's Medicine Show
Eric Scott Fischl
Angry Robot, 2 February 2017
PB, 416 pp

I'm grateful to the publisher for an advance copy of this book via NetGalley.

How to describe the book? It's almost as if Mary Shelley had set Frankenstein, or Robert Louis Stephenson Doctor Jekyll, in the Old West.

But weirder than that, and funnier too.

The eponymous Doctor Alexander Potter sells patent medicine - "the Chock-a-Saw Sagwa tonic" - from the back of a wagon in 1870s Oregon as part of a travelling show featuring, among other attractions, a Chinese fortune teller, a black Hercules (complete with lionskin), a freak show and a French singer, Mercy (who's forced by her husband Lyman Rhoades to provide other services to the customers after the show). Lyman is the presiding (evil) genius of the show, with Potter only a catspaw: in turn Lyman is ruled by the mysterious Morrison Hedwith, who produces the Tonic - and who's into some really strange stuff beyond that.

In short, Hedwith is an alchemist, almost the last of the alchemists, committed to the Great Work - the creation of the Stone which can give immortality (and transmute lead to gold). The show is part of his plan: as if it's not already evil and twisted enough (and with Lyman in charge, believe me, it is) the show is a vehicle for this singularly evil and twisted man.

Which is where Frankenstein and potentially Jekyll come in as this is - among other things - a story that explores both the dark side of knowledge and the pre-modern science that Shelley invoked in her novel. It's full of desperate men, seeking immortality or at least, seeking to stave off death, who regard everyone else at best as tools or objects, at worst as playthings. Some of these men are purposefully cruel (Lyman, whose treatment of his wife is as spine chilling and loathsome as anything I've read in fiction - be aware that this makes for difficult reading in places) while others simply don't care what damage they cause.

The suffering is redeemed, to a degree, by the presence of a trio who start out almost as a comic subplot - a couple of would be outlaws, D Solomon Parker and his brother Agamemnon Rideout and and the respectable dentist Josiah McDaniel who hires them for revenge. Perpetually whisky sodden and inept, they, with Josiah's sister Elizabeth, are the closest thing this book has to heroes as they track the Show for revenge. Elizabeth, especially, who's trying to save Josiah's comes across as more determined, level headed and brave than anyone else here. She's undoubtedly the true hero of this entertaining if at times dark story, setting out into the wilderness to save her brother even though she barely knows how to saddle her horse.

The determination of the quartet, who squabble and drink their way through the wilderness, lightens the book and recalls those classic Westerns where an ill assorted and distrustful bunch must work together to survive. Pitting them against the malign Rhoades makes for a tense if at times blood soaked plot and a vert entertaining read.

One aspect though, detracted from the story for me - the extent to which its women end up in jeopardy and as motivation for rescue. I don't want to overdo that: after all, Elizabeth sets out to save her brother, but he is in turn on a mission of revenge for what happened to his wife Mary, and there are others as well who end up suffering an unpleasant fates and/ or providing motivation to the men That seems unnecessary, because there's plenty here to motivate and involve the reader and the characters.

Overall though, this is a different and truly weird tale, which maintains tension to the end and features some great personalities, a well realised and unusual setting and an inventive plot.

Review: Wake of Vultures and Conspiracy of Ravens

Image from http://www.orbitbooks.net/

Wake of Vultures
Lila Bowen (Delilah S Dawson)
Orbit, 11 October 2016
PB, 342pp

Conspiracy of Ravens
Lila Bowen (Delilah S Dawson)
Orbit, 11 October 2016
PB, 359pp

I'm grateful to Orbit for a copies of both these books.  I'm, unusually, reviewing them together here - inevitably that means some spoilers for Wake in the Ravens review so stop reading at the first review if you want to avoid those.

Nettie Lonesome lives in a land of hard people and hard ground dusted with sand. She's a half-breed who dresses like a boy, raised by folks who don't call her a slave but use her like one. She knows of nothing else. That is, until the day a stranger attacks her. When nothing, not even a sickle to the eye can stop him, Nettie stabs him through the heart with a chunk of wood and he turns to black sand.

And just like that, Nettie can see.

Wake of Vultures

It's a Western. It's fantasy. Its protagonist is a kind of alt-reality Huck Finn, escaping from a brutal childhood and embarking on a series of adventures across a harsh, unforgiving landscape. It's The Lone Ranger or Zorro for the 21st century. It's all kinds of things, but Wake of Vultures is, most of all, utterly, utterly wonderful, readable and addictive.

Nettie - or Rhett, as she decides she'd rather be (the name changes several times as he flees from possess monsters and worse) is escaping near slavery, as a mixed race Native American/ Black orphan brought up on a desolate ranch in the 19th century in what would be Texas in this world (nearest town: Gloomy Bluebird). It's a world stalked by vampire saloon girls, dwarf miners, harpies, Sirens, the terrible Cannibal Owl itself and more. Rhett enthusiastically takes on these threats: after all, at the start of the book he's been hurt much worse by his treatment on grounds of race and gender and (potentially, if he's caught out) gender identity (to use modern terms which don't actually appear in the book, even as it confronts these subjects square on).

All the elements of a classic Western are here: cattle rustling, the glittering desert, "Injuns" (sympathetically portrayed: Bowen admits in a note at the end the difficulty of using language which risks either being wrong for the setting or disrespectful to the modern ear), seamy saloons and a dubious sort of instant justice. But there's more besides: Rhett is a magnificent creation, a girl (at the start) who takes his own fate and his own nature in his hands, identifying as a man and living that identity in various roughneck settings even as he works his way through an awful lot of growing up. Questioning his upbringing, his own worth and his origins (and dealing with those pesky monsters) is a great deal to manage, but he confronts it with aplomb.

I was impressed at the way Bowen empowers Rhett (but also the ranger Sam) to claim suppressed identities and confront the racial and other injustices of the real Old West, acknowledging and subverting the brutal reality behind it. At the same time Bowen's not afraid to use classic fantasy tropes: the prophesy, the Child Who Lived, raised in humble surroundings but (perhaps?) with a great destiny (there's a touch of Harry Potter here even in a story which has much darker and more realistic themes). I thought that actually grounded the story: strange though it may seem, that framework, the quest to destroy a monster, worked very well in the parched-desert-and-hostile-wilderness setting. It's worlds away from the classic Northern European fantasy (fur cloaks and snow) while the Western setting still gives the same sort of lawless environment and the same scope for a quest - having escaped Gloomy Bluebird and joined up with the legendary knights, sorry, Durango Rangers, Rhett sets out to confront a great evil, risking his newfound freedom - and in one powerful scene, identity. (And I wouldn't be surprised if a dragon or two turns up in the series one day).

Oh, and it's a rattling good read too, the sort of book that's best read in one or two sittings: every chapter ends on a cliffhanger (literally, in one case), there's a relentless drive to the central quest and the sense of peril and jeopardy mounts remorselessly. The end runs seamlessly into the next story (so, tomorrow really IS another day...) which promises even greater things.

Overall, a great addition to the genres of both the weird Western and of modern fantasy. Strongly recommended.

Look away now if you haven't read Vultures and don't want to see some mild spoilers.

Conspiracy of Ravens

Still with me? Well, I did warn you...

Ravens picks up right where Vultures ends, with Rhett transformed again into... something and literally leaping to freedom. He's now adopted the identity of The Shadow, legendary defender of the weak, but it takes time to come to terms with that and inevitably the immediate subsequent pages lose some of the tension of the previous book which has just worked up to a climax - Rhett must journey in the desert to explore his new identity (or identities) and learn some painful lessons, including on gratitude.

Indeed one of the attractive qualities about Rhett is that he's far from perfect, too inclined to lash out, perhaps following a less that ideal model of what being a man is: but he learns, he tries to do better, even amongst the monster chasing and questing.

And he's oh so brave and handsome, charming the socks... and other things... off both men and women, which adds a certain tension to camp life. Indeed there's almost so much going on here as to risk our losing sight of the ultimate objective, but that doesn't happen because the new quest here is brought by an Irishman, Earl, who's sometimes a donkey but is never less than focussed on rescuing his brother.

In his aspect as The Shadow, Rhett can't but offer assistance and so the pursuit begins again, as he and his posse set out to kill a sinister railway boss who has a whole camp enslaved and is gradually harvesting them for body parts. It's him who commands the ravens of the title and fantastically creepy servants they are too.

Again the pace is relentless once this pursuit gets going, with many obstacles to be confronted on the way - a cruel beast-show proprietor, the corrupt Rangers of Lamartine and a mysterious horned creature. Some of these encounters impose a real cost, immediately or later on, but Rhett doesn't flinch throughout.

Compulsive, page-turning stuff, if anything even more compelling than Vultures and as before, Bowen leaves the book in the middle of the action with the reader - well, this reader - wanting more.