Servant of a Dark God By John Brown

Servant of a Dark God (Amazon USA - UK - Canada)
by John D. Brown
Tor Books
Hardcover - $17.15 at Amazon! ($25.99 normally)

Note: This book releases on October 13. Tor provided a complementary ARC copy.

Servant of a Dark God by John Brown is one of those novels that I pick up with some reluctance, not really thinking it's for me, but then I end up enjoying it thoroughly.

Mr. Brown has taken a very different approach with Servant of a Dark God. This is an epic fantasy that does not involve epic journeys, recent calamities or long-term character arcs. It does involve long-term lies; the kind of lies that are told over such a long period of time that they are thought of as truths.

Servant of a Dark God begins in the point-of-view of Talen, a boy. He's probably younger than fifteen, but not by much. He has an older brother named Ke and an older sister named River. His father's name is Hogan. He has an Uncle Argoth, with a son named Nettle.

All are important.

In a nearby town, a family has been accused of slethery. Slethery is the illegal use of fire, which is one of the elements of life. All creatures have soul and fire. Fire may be thought of as the days of your life. Slethery is the use of fire that has been taken from another person, hence it's illegality. The accused family consists of Sparrow, a blacksmith, his wife Purity, their daughter Sugar and their blind son, Legs.

Definitely not your run-of-the-mill fantasy names. They're all easy to pronounce, and there's not an apostrophe in the bunch.

The story begins in Talon's point-of-view, and his is the most prevalent viewpoint. Other viewpoint characters are Sugar and Argoth.

And then we have Hunger, another viewpoint character. Hunger is a sort of a golom. He has been created out of rock, wood, dirt and plants. He even has flowers growing out of his shoulder, which makes him rather whimsical, even though he is often horrible. He's one of those villains who engages your sympathy. So half the time you are rooting him on, and the other half, you are saying, "Oh no! If he wins, then my favorite character is going to die!"

UPDATE: Just wanted to expand on Hunger. He is not the villain--you actually feel sorry for the poor creature. But he's no more a villain than Quasimodo was in The Hunchback of Notre Dame, or Lennie was in Of Mice and Men. The actual villain is much more chilling than Hunger.

The story is about the unraveling of old lies. It's also about families. Like Russell Kirkpatrick's Across the Face of the World, the families in this novel, for the most part, remain together. I enjoyed this very much, and it was one of the reasons I liked Kirkpatrick's novel as well. When the group is all family, it makes the lengths the characters will go through on each other's behalf all the greater.

One of the problems I had early on was Talon as the point-of-view character. He's a bit of a brat. He's all too willing to turn Sugar and Legs over to the authorities, even when he knows that they won't get fair treatment. He's part of an oppressed minority, and he's a bit hung up on that. I know this was necessary for his character development, but it did prevent my bonding with him at first. The opening chapter, especially, made him seem foolish and bratty. I was just wishing he would save a puppy or something. Anything to inspire some liking for him.

Fortunately, Sugar's point-of-view wasn't very far in, and she was able to carry me through until Talon grew up a bit.

The worldbuilding is incredible. John Brown doles out his backstory more-or-less evenly, but toward the end, the backstory got a bit heavy. This may have been because Mr. Brown ratcheted up the tension so high that I got impatient when backstory came up. But I had to pay attention, because there were secrets revealed, while leaving other secrets for the next novel.

I was afraid there would be a cliffhanger, but there wasn't. Servant of a Dark God is an unexpected novel, much like The Warded Man was, in that I expected one thing and got something very different. There was a satisfying--if sad--ending that looked toward book 2, leaving just enough unanswered questions to make me look forward to the next book.

~*~

On Thursday, I will post an interview with John Brown. It is one of the most enjoyable interviews I've had with an author in quite some time.

FTC to Monitor Bloggers?

I suspect this bit of news may raise eyebrows in the blogging community:

PHILADELPHIA (AP) -- The Federal Trade Commission will require bloggers to clearly disclose any freebies or payments they get from companies for reviewing their products.

It is the first time since 1980 that the commission has revised its guidelines on endorsements and testimonials, and the first time the rules have covered bloggers.

You can read the rest of this very short article here:

http://finance.yahoo.com/news/FTC-Bloggers-must-disclose-apf-468964868.html?x=0&.v=2

Most of the books I review here are provided by the publisher, but I have never received a dime for a review. Sometimes I disclose the fact that the book I am reviewing was provided by the publisher or author, but I often don't think to do so. It's an 11,000 fine per violation! Will I face a fine for being forgetful? Am I going to have to include some legal mumbo-jumbo on each review post?

I wonder if this new regulation will cover magazines, too. They're doing it for profit. I'm just doing it for the love of it.

This Week

Welcome to the new subscribers who have signed up to follow Fantasy Debut recently. When I have a difficult time posting--as I have had recently--it's always a boost to my spirits when someone wants to subscribe anyway!

And ugh, am I still suffering from the stomach biopsies and twilight anesthesia of last week. I am forbidden to take ibuprofen, so of course a migraine reared its ugly head, and anything other than ibuprofen only makes the pain pull back a little. Plus, I cannot seem to digest meat. I've lost two pounds, which will look good at my Weight Watcher's weigh-in on Tuesday.

I have a review of Servant of a Dark God almost ready to post on Tuesday, plus I just sent an interview off to the author, John Brown. I am into the opening chapters of Slaves of the Shinar, which is an older debut. It has the advantage of featuring a grown man rather than a boy. I have enjoyed all the boy stories I've read recently--despite all my complaining--but it is good to get away from them for a while. And then I'll read Canticle.

Plus, I really want to get my hands on the sequel to Would-Be Witch by Kimberly Frost, which has another adorable cover and is called Barely Bewitched. It just came out on September 15th. I need a Zach fix. Plus, I read the blurb, and the idea of a "toxic spill of pixie dust" is just too funny!

Oh, Joy!

Canticle by Ken Scholes has arrived in the mail! It's another debut graduate, since I reviewed Lamentation earlier this year. Canticle sure looks pretty on my shelf next to Lamentation.

I really need to read some actual debuts, these days. However, I have a review already written for Servant of a Dark God, which is a debut, and I'll go ahead and post it about a week before the October 13th release date. Canticle comes out on the same day, so it will be a busy week. Plus, I'm almost done with a non-debut (kind of) for Fantasy Literature, which I'll link up when it goes live.

Debut Graduate: The Other Lands

The Other Lands (Amazon USA - UK - Canada)
by David Anthony Durham
Doubleday
Hardcover - $28 ($18 at Amazon!)

I first cracked the cover of The Other Lands with a great sense of anticipation, and from the first page to the last, David Anthony Durham did not disappoint.

The Other Lands continues the story of the three royal children of the Akaran family. They are Corinne, who is now queen, Dariel, who could have been king, but let the rule pass to Corinne, and Mena, the warrior princess. There are also several new characters, but it's difficult to introduce some of them without giving spoiling the plot.

Since Corinne resumed the Akaran rule of The Known Lands, the quota trade has continued, but the people have not resumed their dependence on mist, the drug that has kept the populace quiet and happy for hundreds of years. Since the people are sober, they are also restless. They object to sending their children off into an unknown slavery; and they object to crushing Akaran taxes. Corinne has resumed trade relations with the League, and in recompence for Dariel's burning of the League Platforms in the first novel, she has offered them certain lands that might have a warm place in the reader's heart. And they have most diabolical plans for those lands.

Right from the start, the League is up to something. They come to Corinne with a story of a captured spy, a situation that has been the ruination of their trade relationship with the people of the Other Lands. She asks Dariel to go with them to the Other Lands as her emissary. He reluctantly agrees, for they know he is the one who set fire to their platforms in Book 1. Both suspect treachery. Both are right.

Surprises await in the Other Lands, and they are not what you would expect.

In the meantime, Mena is ridding the world of foulthings, twisted creatures left behind by the Santoth after they came to the assistance of Aliver in Book 1. Each foulthing is worse than the last, until she finally tracks down the last one. And she finds a creature that is anything but foul. She forms a bond with the creature, whose nature may surprise you. Or, it may not.

And Corinne is up to more than simply ruling the Known World. She has been studying the Song of Elenet, and she has mastered its music. She begins to use it openly, and the people both love her and are terrified of her, with good reason. She is chilling, but lovable at the same time. As Mr. Durham managed with Hanish Mein, he has created an engaging villain in Corinne. Except I'm not sure she's the real villain. The League would be a candidate for that, or something else, altogether.

There are a couple of marked improvements over the first volume, Acacia. One, is dialog, which Mr. Durham now writes out rather than summarizes, for the most part. The other is Mr. Durham's use of cliffhanger chapter endings. It became very difficult to put the book down at the end of the chapter, or even at the end of a scene break. More than one time, I continued the reading session longer than I intended, for I simply didn't want to put it down. Most of the time, I only put it down when I got to Rialus chapters. But even then they were engaging, because Rialus continues to somehow find himself working with the enemy--despite his best intentions otherwise--so Rialus's point-of-view often gives a window into what the enemy is doing. It is a particularly masterful touch.

The only part that made me wince was a hint of a romantic threesome forming in book three. Nothing happened in this book, but I'm a bit leery about where this is heading. I was hoping for a great romance with this character, but this isn't exactly what I had in mind. In general, the romantic subplots in this novel are not strong. Dariel and Mena are both involved with characters that come across as weaker than themselves, but I understand that this is probably intentional. The best romance in this series so far took place in The War with the Mein, and it was between Corinne and her captor and enemy, Hanish Mein. The simultaneous love and hate between them made for some great tension. Since all these characters are so much larger than life, the possibility for a wonderful, self-sacrificing romance is there.

One part in particular made me smile. A while back--back when I first wrote to Mr. Durham about the possibility of getting an advance copy--Mr. Durham replied with something unexpected. After re-reading my multi-part review of Acacia: The War with the Mein, he decided he needed to tweak The Other Lands. He didn't tell me exactly what he had changed, just that my review had affected the story.

I recognized it as soon as I reached that part of the story. Which was very cool.

Doubleday did a fabulous job with the book itself, with maps on both inside covers, the inclusion of a synopsis of book one (no substitute for the original!), and an awesome cover.

Oh, and the ending. It will blow you away. Yes, it's a cliffhanger. But for me, it was still an ending that satisfied, mostly because it was completely unexpected. As was much of the rest of the story. This is now my favorite epic fantasy. I am very much looking forward to reading the next volume. But . I probably have a while to wait!

Here is my multi-part review of Acacia: The War with the Mein, plus some other stuff. Just scroll down.

Writer Wednesday - Setting

This post was delayed by three weeks. Many apologizies.

For me, setting is a huge part of what brings wonder to a novel. Even a gritty novel could be tempered with a bit of wonder. Within the past year, the novel with the strongest sense of wonder for me was The Red Wolf Conspiracy by Robert V. S. Redick. And that was mostly because of the setting on board a singular, mighty ship.

The first contemporary fantasy I ever read stuck with me through the years largely because of the wonderful setting of its very first scene. Imagine a tree as large as a redwood, with limbs that spread as broad as an oak. And then imagine, nestled in the arms of that tree, an inn:

It was getting harder to keep up the old inn. There was a lot of love rubbed into the warm finish of the wood, but even love and tallow couldn't hide the cracks and splits in the well-used tables or prevent a customer from sitting on an occasional splinter. The Inn of the Last Home was not fancy, not like some she'd heard about in Haven. It was comfortable. The living tree in which it was built wrapped its ancient arms around it lovingly, while the walls and fixtures were crafted around the boughs of the tree with such care as to make it impossible to tell where nature's work left off and man's work began. The bar seemed to ebb and flow like a polished wave around the living wood that supported it. The stained glass in the window panes cast welcoming flashes of vibrant color across the room.

From this,  the second paragraph of Dragons of Autumn Twilight, the first volume of the Dragonlance Chronicles, the authors established a sense of wonder in their setting. And they didn't let up throughout the entire trilogy.

Upon the next page comes the reason for the tree being built in the inn:

The Inn of the Last Home was built high in the branches of a mighty vallenwood tree, as was every other building in Solace, with the exception of the blacksmith shop. The townspeople had decided to take to the trees during the terror and chaos following the Cataclysm. And thus Solace became a tree town, one of the few truly beautiful wonders left on Krynn.

Which is a lie. From Prayer's Eye Peak to Godshome and the Dark Queen's temple in Naraka, it's hard to find a trilogy with so many imaginative settings. Lots of people like to deride the Dragonlance Chronicles. Say what you will, but the authors did at least two things very well: they created lovable characters, and they created wonderful settings.

Other memorable settings come from novels I keep mentioning again and again. The forest in The Once and Future King. The cave in Clan of the Cave Bear. New York City at the end of the nineteenth century in The Gaslight Mysteries. The Shire, Rivendell and Minas Tirith in Lord of the Rings. The Cliffs of Insanity in The Princess Bride.

One real-world sight that inspired me was the Luxor in Las Vegas. There is a light that shines from the top of the pyramid straight out into space. It's arrogant and it's so very American. The entire hotel inspired a setting in my epic fantasy, which I'll share in the comments.

Please share any settings that have inspired you and, if you wish, allow us to read some of the settings you have written. As ever, please place your comments and your excerpts in separate posts, and keep any excerpts to 300 words or fewer.

Twilight

No, not the book. Are you kidding? Me, read a YA vampire novel? I haven't even watched the movie.

Twilight, as in the anesthesia. I'm still feeling the effects 10 hours later. Nothing serious, but the doc wanted to look inside my stomach. He saw some redness in there and took some biopsies. He wants me to take Zantac twice a day and come see him in two weeks, once the biopsy result are in.

To keep my daughter content during the afternoon while I recovered, I asked her, "Do you want to watch a Jane Austen movie?" She said, "Yes!" and immediately requested Northanger Abbey. I denied it because we just saw it two weeks ago, and because it is only two hours long. I needed more time than that. So she requested Emma, next.

The girl knows her Jane Austen. I'm raising her right.

However, say what you will of Emma, but it's kind of a snoozer for an eight year old girl. It wasn't keeping her attention so I said, "Let's watch Pride and Prejudice." She was agreeable. I held the two versions I have of the movie up (the BBC version and the Colin Firth version) and asked her which one she wanted to watch. She pointed to Colin.

So in it went. It kept her spellbound for four and a half hours. I snoozed during the early part of it, right up until she yelled something during Lizzy and Darcy's dance at Netherfield.  I tried going to bed, but it was no use. I was awake.

And what did she ask for after the second and final volume had finished? Volume three!

On Murky Middles

 Middle volumes in a trilogy have got to be the most difficult volume to write. As an author, you have to keep upping the tension, while revealing secrets from the first book to satisfy your reader, while also establishing new secrets to keep your readers enthralled until the next book. All too often, the middle volumes fail to deliver and deserve the nickname, "Murky Middle".

When writing a middle volume, a debut author has a much more difficult job, in my opinion, than the established author. Once you've gotten through your first trilogy, we readers know you can deliver, so we're more likely to give you a break. Not so the first time. We've been burned before, you see. We are kind of expecting you to fail. Not that we want you to fail. But we're wondering if the first book was a fluke. So the first time you write a middle, you have a bigger job than once you are established. Consider it your Authorial Trial by Fire. And you thought getting published in the first place was your trial by fire. Hah!

When I consider reading a second volume, I first assess not only how much I liked the first volume, but also how much it stayed with me. Do I barely remember the plot after a year? If so, even if I liked the first volume, I probably won't move on to the second. Do I recall any points where the plot dragged, and where I struggled to get through it? If so, then I'm going to assume that these problems will be worse in the second volume. Am I still excited by the story? If so, I probably won't wait till the next novel comes out in paperback.

It's easy to get frustrated when reading a second volume. If I get the impression that as a reader, I'm just being strung along to fill the length of a book, I'm going to get frustrated. If the author keeps throwing complications in there, they had better make sense with the overarching plot, or I'm going to lose patience. A new character or two helps, because they add intrigue. However, too many new characters is overwhelming. I recently tried to read a middle where almost all the characters were new. I never finished the novel and probably won't ever finish the series.

I also get annoyed by series that goes on too long. I think three books is quite enough for one storyline, and four is pushing it. The only pentology (is that the right word?) I recall enjoying is Stephen Lawhead's Grail series. It worked because each book was about a different person in the Arthur cycle. However, even then, the final volume was difficult to get through. (Part of the problem was the subject matter. You know the Arthur cycle is not going to end well, so it's very difficult to paste a satisfying ending in there.)

What delights me about second volumes? I love it when the characters continue to grow. I love it when they meet new challenges, as long as I can see them fitting into the overall goal. I enjoys twists and turns in the plot, as long as it moves forward. I enjoy romantic complications. I enjoy it when the problem you thought you had in Book One becomes part of a much larger problem in Book Two.

And I kind of like cliffhangers. I know a lot of people hate them, but not me. Maybe I'm just into reader torture.

What are your thoughts on Murky Middles?

Debut Showcase: Queen of Hearts

Queen of Hearts (Amazon USA - UK)
by Daniel Horman (Blog - Composer Website)
Prime Books
Trade Paperback

One question remains: Did it begin or end in theft? His mother, taken before memory, his father, disappeared in the Manor where Asriael rules, home of the Great Game, where lives are antes and countries divided by mere hands, where the deed to the Slants was bet and lost so many years ago. The underground wizards of the Slants had trained Renue in the high arts, as an expert in disguise, a deadly fighter, a daring card player.

His mission was to infiltrate the Manor and win back the deed so that Asriael's dark magic could finally be unraveled and the people freed. But inside the Manor, Renue meets a mysterious young woman called the Queen of Hearts who seems to hold the secrets to his parents' fate. When Asriael is murdered and the mission betrayed, Renue and the Queen must flee the Manor, the Black Thing on their trail. As the other great lords vie for power, amid chaos and war, Renue must protect the Queen while they search for an ancient magic to end the nightmare of Asriael's black revenge.

The author is also a composer and has a website to showcase his music. He had an interesting path to publication; after selling a short story to Fantasy Magazine, the publisher--who is also the publisher for Prime Books--commissioned a novel. And this is it. I liked this blurb--which I found at Amazon--better than the blurb on his site. I was not able to find this novel at Prime Books' website, but it is available at Amazon. The UK Amazon link shows this novel as unavailable.

The cover image was strangely hard to find, which is why you don't see one here.

Short Week

It will be a short week for me, both here and at work, for I am off to take a short vacation. It's a visiting-family type of vacation. I expect walks on the beach, swims in the pools, and strolls through the buggy Florida woods, well armed with DEET. I will bring along The Other Lands if I have not finished it by Wednesday, which is when we are leaving. We'll be back by the weekend--I'm just not sure exactly when on the weekend.

I hope to return refreshed. This was not a relaxing summer, but things have improved. My child is settled in a new school situation. I had my eye doctor re-make the lenses of my glasses. They appear to have been ever-so-slightly tilted, which meant that I was looking at the world through a blur. Normally, when you wear progressive bifocals, the blur is supposed to be outside your field of vision. I had a blur right where I was looking. I was amazed at the difference once I got my new glasses. Still not like having young eyes again, but the headaches are gone.

When I get back, I'll have an announcement. Nothing agent related--unless I'm totally surprised in the next week (and thank those of you who wished me well in that regard). It's something that I've been working on lately, robbing me of the time to work on this blog like I used to.

I updated my policies, and until I catch up on my current reading stack, I'm not taking any more review copies. Sometimes publishers send them to me unsolicited--and I can't help that--but the rate at which they come have slowed to a trickle, for which I am grateful. I really do owe it to the authors whose novels I've already taken to attempt to get caught up.