Black Gate

If you have a book you’d like me to review, please see the submission guidelines here. I’ve run short on books that I’ve received in the past year, so anything new has a good chance of being reviewed.

This month’s self-published novel is Malarat by Jessica Rydill. The book is the third book in Ms. Rydill’s shamanworld series, but also a standalone novel. The novel takes place in a world much like our own, with France (called Lefranu), England (Anglond), Jews (Wanderers), and Christians (Doxans). But these analogs are not exact (for example, the Doxans elevate Megalmayar, the Mother of God, to the position of a goddess) and there are also a number of things that are very different, such as the Great Cold, that isolated a portion of Lefranu so that it remained stuck in Medieval times while the rest of the world advanced to what most closely resembles the late 19^th and early 20^th century, complete with trains, firearms, and electricity.

The novel focuses on Annat Vasilyevich and her father, Yuda, two Wanderers who are also shaman, who have a number of magical (or psychic) abilities, such as communicating by thought, traveling to other worlds, and blasting things with shaman fire. They have been asked by the rulers of Masalyar, a large city-state in Lefranu, to investigate the rise of Clovis, a new claimant for the crown of Lefranu, who has the support of the Duc de Malarat, a powerful duke, and the Canes Dei, Doxan warrior-priests with a reactionary theology and an invention, the Spider, which they can use to overcome shaman. The Canes Dei are led by the beautiful but brutal Valdes de Siccaria. Yuda is a former Railway guard, who has connections among the Railway workers, but he was crippled in a previous adventure. He plans on disguising himself as a pilgrim seeking the blessing of the new king. They are accompanied on their mission by Yuda’s non-shaman son Malchik, Malchik’s lover, Camille, and their newborn daughter, Annat’s current lover Genie and ex-husband Cluny, Yuda’s apprentice Huldis, the railway workers Nico and Lukacs, and the nuns Sister Coty and Mother Kana. This is admittedly a large cast, but they soon split into smaller parties, with Annat and Genie staying in the city of Yonar in order to defend it. There they are joined by Casildis, Huldis’s sister, and her husband, Sergey Govorin, and the shaman Semyon Magus. The others continue on toward their fateful encounter with Clovis’s forces.

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“Beneath the rule of tyrants, monsters may become heroes.”

Walter Rhein gives us something different in the way of heroic fantasy – a story set in a future world where it is forbidden to learn to read, forbidden to teach people to read. In the hierarchy of Erafor, reading and writing has been outlawed for decades, though basic iconography is allowed for the sake of keeping records.

The mysterious and powerful Seneschals are charged with eliminating all texts and “readers” in this brave new world, a world I hope to never find myself living in. For this is also a world where slaves are kept as animals, and are doped up on a brain-rotting drug called Bliss that keeps them docile, so they won’t rise up and pose a threat to their masters. But one slave, named Kikkan, manages to murder his master and mistress, and eventually escape to explore his world, in search of freedom, knowledge, and understanding.

But he chooses not to kill the slave owners’ children, and thus they vow revenge. This is not only the story of Kikkan’s murderous revolt; it is also the story of his education and his growth as a character and as a human being.

And then there’s Quillion, a rebellious soldier patrolling the border just north of the lands of Acheron, who also commits murder when he kills his buffoon of a commanding officer, a man who risks everyone else’s life but his own. Quillion has a rudimentary knowledge of reading and wants to learn more because there are things he desires to know, and he believes that knowledge is his right to own. When he and Cole, his friend, companion, and fellow soldier are conscripted to help in the hunt for the Reader of Acheron – someone who is teaching people to read, in violation of all the laws of the land – they find themselves caught up in politics, social ideals, and ideas… which are dangerous and what the hierarchy is dedicated to stamping out.

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The CBS TV series adaptation of Stephen King’s 2009 novel Under the Dome went into its second season this summer. I haven’t watched the show, but I always thought the premise would make good television. Since the show clearly has a following, I figured I’d revisit my initial impressions of the novel. Up first is what I posted on Goodreads immediately after I finished the book in the summer of 2010. Following that are some additional thoughts as I look back four years later.

June 2010: In a way, this is The Stand on a small scale: specifically, the scale of one rural Maine town. At over 1,000 pages, however, the book’s scale is anything but small. Typical King, though — all the things that fans enjoy about his writing are here: a broad cast of characters, lots of pop-culture references, and everyday people suddenly thrust into a strange situation of survival-of-the-fittest.

Basic premise, if you haven’t already heard, is that the town of Chester’s Mill, Maine — population 2,000 — finds itself cut off from the rest of the world by a sudden, inexplicable, invisible dome that rises far up into the stratosphere and goes deep into the earth. Things, as you can well imagine, go to hell. What may be surprising is how quickly it does: in a matter of days, not weeks or months.

I won’t say anything about the ending, except to say I found it somewhat unsatisfying — King sometimes seems to have trouble wrapping up his books. They start with a bang and keep you turning the pages until the end, but the endings are often lacking in finesse.

One other pitfall that King falls into too much here is the tendency to break people into two camps: the white-hats and the black-hats, with villains so villainously drawn they could be twirling their curly moustaches as a train heads for a damsel tied to the train track.

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