Review: The Throne of the Five Winds by S.C. Emmett

The Throne of the Five Winds (Hostage of Empire #1) by S.C. Emmett
My rating: 5 of 5 stars
Publication Date: October 15, 2019


If you're looking for bloody battles or magical duels or epic quests . . . look further, cause this is definitely not the book for you. There is no magic here, no quests (unless you consider 'trying to stay alive in a palace with more assassins per capita than there are bankers in Manhattan' to be a quest), and the only (physical) battles end well before our narrative begins. But if you, like me, find court intrigue absolutely riveting, then oh god do I have the book for you.

The newly-reconstituted Empire of Zhaon, the Land of the Five Winds, has just defeated its fierce neighbor Khir in battle. As part of the surrender terms, the Great Rider of Khir's only daughter has been dispatched to marry the Crown Prince of Zhaon, accompanied only by a single (quite fierce) lady-in-waiting. The two women must navigate a palace that's less a snake pit than a bloody, shark-filled ocean, as the Emperor's health worsens, his six sons (and their mothers) vie for power, and enemies beyond their borders begin to plot.

The writing here is absolutely superb. This is a very long book (the first of a series), with a decently large cast of characters, but at no point did I ever have trouble remembering who was who, who was allied with whom, etc. And the author is one of those truly gifted writers whose prose I can just fall into; her language has cadence, rhythm, depth---beauty to spare. Her scenes are exquisitely crafted, conversations with double meanings crafted so brilliantly I was literally in awe, each word honed to absolute perfection.

Fans of books like The Goblin Emperor, or political/court drama in general (or even regency romances---the romance factor here is clear and present, though never overdone) will find a lot to love here. (But with way more assassination attempts. Seriously, there is a ridiculous amount of assassination attempts in this book.) This is a book I'll probably be pulling out to comfort-read on rainy days for years to come, and I'm really excited for the sequel.

(As an aside, it's mentioned in the back extras that S.C. Emmett is a pseudonym for Lilith Saintcrow. Never in a million years would I have guessed that! I've read some of her other works--some I liked a lot, others that weren't my cup of tea--and this is definitely the most ambitious writing, worldbuilding-wise, I think I've seen from her yet.)

Overall: highly, highly recommended.

A big thanks to Netgalley and the publisher for providing a free copy in exchange for an honest review!

Review: Half Way Home by Hugh Howey

Half Way Home by Hugh Howey
My rating: 4 of 5 stars
Publication Date: October 1, 2019


Half Way Home isn't a novella--I don't have the word count, but it's structured and plotted like a full-length novel, albeit very much on the shorter end of that scale--but it definitely feels like one. In scope, in character development, etc., this stands as a complete story, but could easily be appended as "Part 1" of a longer cycle, though Goodreads tells me that isn't the case. (Also, that this is being re-published, so unless there are plans to continue on later, this is definitely a stand-alone.)

The plot is relatively straightforward: to get around the distance issue, humanity has begun 'seeding' worlds with blastocysts instead of fully-grown colonists. An AI raises and teaches the humans (decanting them as full-grown adults), builds the colony for them, and . . . well, and it's programmed to incinerate everyone and everything if the chosen planet turns out not to be as hospitable to life as originally thought. Which happens--sort of--at the beginning of our story; a group of 15-year-olds end up decanted early while the rest of their proto-colony burns, for reasons the AI refuses to discuss. That mystery---where they are, what's gone wrong, etc.---drive the story to its conclusion.

Overall, I enjoyed this a lot. It's a fun little story, engagingly written. (A certain famously cheesy scifi series was clearly the inspiration here, and if you finish this without knowing exactly which one I'm talking about, then there's really no hope for you.) Will this enter the scifi canon as one of the greats? Definitely not. But if you're looking for an afternoon's entertainment, this is the perfect story to curl up with.

I received a free copy from Netgalley in exchange for an honest review.

Review: A Lush and Seething Hell by John Hornor Jacobs

A Lush and Seething Hell: Two Tales of Cosmic Horror by John Hornor Jacobs 
My rating: 4 of 5 stars
Publication Date: October 8, 2019

Cosmic horror is by far my favorite subgenre, so I was really excited about A Lush And Seething Hell, a duology containing a novella ("The Sea Dreams It Is The Sky") and a short novel ("My Heart Struck Sorrow"), both dealing with the horrors within and the horrors without and the horrors teeming beneath. Overall, I'd say this is an excellent addition to any cosmic horror afficionado's bookshelf, though I definitely preferred the second work to the first, as I'll discuss below:

THE SEA DREAMS IT IS THE SKY: The first (and shorter) work in the duology has a lot to recommend it, but---unfortunately---also a lot to condemn. The central concept is refreshingly original: two refugees from Magera---a nonexistent Latin American country that ticks all the boxes Americans associate with that region, including suffering under a brutal American-backed dictatorship---encounter each other in a cafe in Spain. One is a famous poet, wanted by the regime and haunted by his experiences in his homeland . . . and by an otherworldly text whose translation contains, and brings, madness. The other, our narrator, is a young academic who gets caught up in the poet's, and her homeland's, many horrors.

I loved the ideas behind this. A Latin American country that never existed . . . or did it, now? If an eldritch horror overtook a country Down There and pulled it from existence, how many Americans would even notice the hole? Here, cosmic horror provides the perfect analogy for American influence on, but ignorance of, Latin America that I can possibly think of.

But . . . well, the main joy of cosmic horror lies in what isn't and can't be shown. That's why it's a genre that's always incredibly difficult to translate well to the screen. But that doesn't mean a writer can go for long, interminable stretches ignoring the whole 'cosmic horror' part of their cosmic horror tale. Far too often, "The Sea Dreams It Is The Sky" suffers from that worst malady: it's more concerned with its narrator's navel-gazing than with any eldritch horrors. "Turgid" is probably the word I'd use; not for all of it, of course, because the parts in past and present Magera, suffering from its otherworldly 'miasma', are quite fantastic. There just aren't enough of them. (I've never read Roberto Bolano, which the description tells me is an influence, so perhaps there are depths here that I missed. All I know is, I had to force myself to read through parts of this because my attention kept wandering.)

Overall, this is the sort of story whose plot I kind of want some other author to steal and re-work, because the ideas behind it are superb, it's just . . . the execution is somewhat lacking.

MY HEART STRUCK SORROW: Had this been a stand-alone, I'd have given it five stars without blinking. Heavier on plot and far, far creepier than its predecessor, "My Heart Struck Sorrow" stars a folklorist who, recently having lost his wife and son to tragedy, discovers the chilling records of a famous colleague's trek through the Depression-era South, in search of an eldritch song. Racism and madness, guilt and suffering, the past and present darknesses of America and their ties to our cultural products: each of these strings gets deftly plucked, but unlike in "The Sea Dreams It Is The Sky", the author here never wallows in his characters' sense of self. The story charges, bull-like, through to the teeming horrors just out of vision, virulently present but just out of reach, acknowledging horrors within and without and beneath but never prioritizing one above the rest.

One of my favorite aspects was the weaving of traditional Christian ideas about hell and horror (oh, those rotten apple trees!) with 'traditional' cosmic horror ideas about true horror existing beyond and beneath our conceptions. (You can see the shadow of The King in Yellow overlaying the plot, but only a whisper, only a dream; this is its own horror, and all the deeper for it.) I really liked the author's incorporation of real American music, the way the author ties the real to the profane. I'd never heard of "Stagger Lee" (which is and definitely is not the song in question) before, but YouTube tells me it's old and popular. It takes a deft touch to draw on popular music like this (I'm looking at you, Battlestar Galactica and All Along The Watchtower!) but the author manages to avoid any triteness here while still wrapping otherworldly horror beneath the skin of our more ordinary horrors.

Overall: if you enjoy cosmic horror, or any horror at all, I'd say definitely pick this duology up. There's a refreshing, intricate originality in both stories that's well worth your time.

I received a free copy from the publisher in exchange for an honest review.

Review: The Bone Ships by R.J. Barker

The Bone Ships by R.J. Barker
My rating: 2.8 of 5 stars
Publication Date: September 24, 2019


As a longtime fantasy reader, few things annoy me as much as writers who needlessly invent words. I don't mean words for new concepts, new animals, new magical elements, things like that; I mean word substitutions that serve no logical purpose. Saying "sither" instead of sister. (Still using "brother", though!) Saying "Skearith's Eye" instead of "the sun". An endless slew of Those Dreaded Compound Words---we all know and fear them!---when the author slaps two or more unrelated words together to describe an object that probably doesn't need a name to begin with, attempting to dazzle us with their worldbuilding skills while only succeeding in ripping us out of the story.

The Bone Ships sins greatly in this regard, and it sins right from the start. The sheer quantity of unnecessary invented words operates like the story version of a speed bump; just as you start getting into the story, whoops! Here's another string of nonsense words whose only purpose is to force you to stop and figure out what the hell is being described. By the time you return to the story proper, all sense of pacing and plot and character development has metaphorically tumbled off the cliff. (The fact that most of this story takes place on a ship, which already has lots of unfamiliar elements, does not help matters.)

The story is uncomplicated. Ship captain ('shipwife', all ships here being dubbed as male) Joron Twiner loses a fight (and command of his ship of condemned criminals) to the famous Meas Gilbryn, and ends up serving as her second-in-command on a quest to save the last known arakeesian (a sort of sea dragon, a long-thought-extinct race whose bones are used to make ships), hopefully bringing peace between two warring seafaring nations in the process. Many and sundry things happen along the way, few of which held my attention for any length, leading to a somewhat anticlimactic ending and a setup for Book 2.

Part of me wonders if I'd have enjoyed this more had the story been centered on the island archipelago, not on a ship. Because the politics of this society are, if not always the most logical, certainly more enthralling than the action on the open seas: in this world, much of the population is born deformed in some way, and political power is held by women who prove their 'strength' by giving birth to unblemished children and surviving the births, (and by the men who service them sexually). Each firstborn child is sacrificed to the ships, creating magical 'corpselights' that the population believes are necessary to power the ships, even though ships exist that have no corpselights and everyone knows those work just fine. They also seem to assign jobs to the malformed based on what they've lost: lose a foot, you become a cobbler. Lose a hand, you have to sew. Like I said, this is not the most logical society in the fantasy genre, but I think you really can't go wrong with human sacrifice and a fertility-based political system, at least when it comes to the entertainment factors.

Overall, this was just not my cup of tea.

I received a free copy from Netgalley in exchange for an honest review.