Black Gate

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Back when I reviewed the first Noggle Stones book, The Goblin’s Apprentice, I knew there was a sequel. Of course I could only review one book at a time and I figured I should start at the beginning. Though I really enjoyed the first volume, I didn’t want to review books in the same series two months in a row, so I couldn’t cover the second book right away. Now that it’s been a year, enough time has passed for me to take on the sequel.

The Tragic Empire takes place a few months after the events of the first book. Martin Manchester is settling in as the king of Willow Prairie, establishing alliances with the nearby realms of dwarves, ogres, and other folk. The goblin Bugbear serves as Manchester’s diplomat while pursuing his own investigations, with a particular interest in discovering what force was behind the Shadow Smith, the villainous mastermind of The Goblin’s Apprentice. To that end, he’s allowed himself to be thrown into an Áes Dána prison, in hopes of finding access to their archives, which contain works dating back to the Coranieid Empire. After a tricky escape and some fancy diplomacy, it seems that Bugbear may get what he wants, until the US Army attacks the Áes Dána.

Which answers one of the lingering questions of the first book. We saw what happened to the town of Willow Prairie when our world of 1899 merged with a world of ogres, goblins, and dwarves, but there was no indication of what happened to the rest of the world until now. Surely someone in Washington noticed all these strange people appearing from nowhere and decided to do something about it. War against the invaders would be an obvious option.

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I have a soft spot for dwarves. I consider elves over-used Mary Sues and I could go another decade or two without reading another story about fairies, but give me short smiths with beards and axes who drink too much and I’ll keep reading. Which brings us to this month’s self-published book: The Nameless Dwarf: The Complete Chronicles. This wasn’t a book that the author submitted to me by my normal process: I’ll get back to those next month. This time, I actually bought the book from Amazon for actual money, because hey, it was about a dwarf.

Nameless (and yes, everybody calls him Nameless) has a bit of a history. Much of it is chronicled in earlier books, only a couple of which seem to be available from Amazon. Because of this, I decided to take a chance on The Nameless Dwarf without reading about Nameless’s previous adventures. The problem is that the backstory is a bit much to take in all at the beginning. The long and short of it is that Nameless came in possession of a cursed axe. Despite this, he engaged in a number of adventures with the well-known hero Shader, but later, the axe overcame him and caused him to do all sorts of unsavory things, including butchering a lot of his fellow dwarves and becoming a tyrannical dictator and driving them to war, until at last his people fled. When Nameless was finally freed of the cursed axe, he decided that he needed to seek his people out, not to ask forgiveness, which was impossible, but to tell them they could go home, before their exile in the nightmare lands of Qlippoth destroy them utterly. And that’s where the novel begins. I can’t help feeling that the backstory would have had more power if I had been able to read the earlier books and there were plenty of references to people and events from the previous stories that I would have liked to know more about. But even so, there was enough explained at the beginning that I wasn’t entirely lost.

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This month’s self-published book is Mistress of the Dancing Bones by Thomas Alexander.

Four hundred years ago, the Deathlords threatened to destroy all of humanity. It was the nephilim who saved the human race. Thus was the Code Sanguine founded: humans swore to serve the nephilim, and if required, give them their blood, while the nephilim swore to protect humanity, and raise the best of the humans to nephilim themselves. For before the Code Sanguine, the nephilim were known by another name: vampires.

Ashia is the daughter of a nephilim warlord, Marcel Boucher, and his human wife. This does not make her a nephilim, or even part nephilim. She is fully human until embraced by the nephilim. She is also, thanks to her mother, Dahraki, one of the dragon-blooded, and that gives her access to another kind of magic, the necromancy of the Than Khet. Unfortunately, the servant who secretly tutored her in Than Khet magic neglected to tell her that it is incompatible with becoming nephilim. Should a Than Khet be embraced as a nephilim, she would go mad as the two parts of herself warred.

When he discovers what has happened, Ashia’s father is furious. All his dreams for his daughter have come crashing down. But larger problems plague Ashia’s family. Renegade vampires are plaguing Marcel’s territory and the family’s enemies are placing the blame squarely on Marcel and his willingness to embrace barbarians rather than civilized Avensh as nephilim. In order to discover the truth, Ashia agrees to accompany the legendary nephilim witch-hunter Dusang and his demon-cat-fey ally, Tama, in tracking down the renegades and discovering the truth behind a conspiracy that involves not only renegades and political enemies, but the Deathlords themselves.

I am generally not a fan of vampire novels. I prefer my vampires as antagonists rather than as love interests. And for the love of God, sunlight better burn, or at least weaken, them, not cause them to sparkle. So I was taking a chance on this novel, but I’m glad I did.

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This month’s self-published novel is Woman of the Woods by Milton Davis. Set in the land of Meji, a mythical land based on ancient Africa, Woman of the Woods is the story of Sadatina, a young woman of the Adamu. For centuries, the Adamu have been under attack by the nyoka, dark ape-like servants of the god Karan. Their only protection has been the Shosa, warrior-women blessed by their god, Cha, to fight the nyoka. Even as a young girl, Sadatina is stronger and faster than her older brother, better at hunting and fighting than any of the young men in her village. She eventually learns that this is because she is the forbidden daughter of a Shosa, and even untrained, she is blessed with their fighting ability. She needs those abilities when the nyoka come, slaughtering her adoptive family, leaving her to fend for herself, and eventually her village, with only the aid of two shumbas–jungle cats whom she has raised from cubs. It is as the village’s protector that she earns the name Woman of the Woods, since she protects the village while living apart from it. The Shosa find her there, and invite her to join them. At first she refuses, and returns home. At this point, the story skips forward twenty years, to where she has not only become a Shosa, but their military and spiritual leader.

The latter half of the book, where Sadatina is a mature warrior rather than an awkward girl, is a different story than the beginning. In a longer work, where the second half was a separate novel in its own right, the change would have been less jarring. As it is, it takes some getting used to for the reader to see Sadatina giving orders rather than rebelling against them. The latter half’s story is also larger, more epic story than the coming of age story which filled the first half of the novel. Rashadu, a nyoka who long ago turned against his master, has returned, and it is up to Sadatina to decide whether he is an enemy or an ally against Karan.

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Sorrel in Scarlet is an old-fashioned sword and sorcery tale (with just a little bit of early industrial technology), which put me in mind of Edgar Rice Burroughs’s John Carter series, not least because of the abundance of red and the scantiness of clothing. But there’s also the obvious parallel of the heroes finding themselves lost in a strange land and coming to the rescue of the people there. I do think this book comes across favorably in the comparison, since the heroine, Sorrel, is less superhuman than Captain Carter, and thus her adventures are more believable.

In the years before the story begins, the humans of Sendaal rose up against their dragon overlords… and lost. Sorrel is one of the few remaining pilots in Sendaal, and part of a group of rebels looking to achieve some measure of revenge. To that end, she steals a jasq–the living symbiote that provides sorcery to both humans and dragons–from Wrack, the very dragon who had cut her own jasq out and stolen her sorcery. Her daring escape goes less smoothly, and Sorrel crash lands her triplane in the Chasm. This deep rift in the ground is perpetually shrouded in mist, and those on the surface believe that it either leads to a sea or the center of the Earth. Instead, there’s a vast scarlet forest at the bottom of the rift. With her co-pilot dead and suffering from fatal injuries herself, Sorrel implants the jasq in herself in a desperate attempt to save her life. Implanting a second jasq is usually fatal, but in this case works… mostly. It heals her injuries, but causes agony whenever she tries to enter the magerealm to use sorcery.

One would think that being trapped in the Chasm with a dragon, a destroyed plane, and a non-functional jasq would be enough of a challenge, but Sorrel soon discovers that there are worse things in the Chasm. The red forest is crawling with deadly predators, orc-like graalur, and worst of all, the serpentine lloruk, creatures of legend thought to be extinct after their war with the elves. Fortunately, there are more or less friendly humans there too, and Sorrel soon finds herself trying to help them against the graalur. The lloruk are on the warpath, conquering and enslaving city after town, and preparing to use something worse on the surviving humans–a modified jasq called a larisq that can control the mind. Sorrel is desperate to help those who took her in; but it’s a task she can’t perform on her own, without any technology or magic, and she finds herself relying on her worst enemy, Wrack.

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Back in November of last year, I offered to review self-published books for the Black Gate blog. As I said when I started:

Nowadays, it’s really easy to self-publish a book. However, it’s very, very hard to stand out in the crowd. For every author who breaks through, there are hundreds out there who do not. While many of these self-published books are deservedly unknown, I believe that there are self-published books out there that deserve more attention than they’re receiving, and I’d like to help them get it. So I’m offering to review one self-published fantasy book each month. Considering that there are hundreds or thousands published every day, I’m sure that this won’t even scratch the surface. So in order to help me find out which books I should be reviewing, and to give you the best opportunity to sell yourself, I’m going to set up a submission system.

Now that I’ve been doing these reviews for half a year, I thought that now would be a good time to look back and think about my approach. That and I was slow selecting a book to review last month.

When I first hung up a shingle offering to do reviews for Black Gate, I had a quite a few review requests, and it was a challenge just doing the minimum due diligence on them all. My technique consisted of reading the blurb, and if I thought that sounded interesting, reading the writing sample I requested. If I thought it was promising from that point, I’d mark it as a possibility. However, I didn’t request a copy of the book until I’d gone through all the requests, which gave me a chance to ask for the book I thought looked most promising.

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