Mark Charan Newton - City of Ruin

My review of Mark Charan Newton's City of Ruin is up at Strange Horizons. For those coming over from Strange Horizons, my review of Newton's Nights of Villjamur is here.

Reading in February

Abercrombie's latest is blood soaked, grit under your nails fun – the kind of fun that's had watching two big groups of men smash into each other for three days and watching their honor, morale, and bodies fall to pieces, all described in starkly modern and sarcastic prose. The book's structure was interesting, and it will certainly be enjoyed by fans of Abercrombie's prior work, though I don't think that he's yet managed to reclaim the revelatory power of The First Law.

 Reading an established author's debut is often an interesting experience, as well as a somewhat worrisome one. Are you going to get to see an unfettered and fresh version of the brilliance you've grown to expect or will it be a sodden, meandering mess? In the case of Consider Phlebas, it's a bit of both. Review coming.

The Face that Must Die is a deeply unpleasant novel, a nightmarish trudge through a deranged and hateful mind, a novel filled with innocents who seem unable or unwilling to save themselves and predators that are twisted, loathsome, and, above all, human. It is, in other words, damn fine horror. Review coming.

 As I said after finishing the first Sandman collection (Preludes & Nocturnes), I simply don't understand how the early issues can be immature compared to the later ones. The Doll's House more than the first collection shows signs of relative immaturity, and there were some weaker moments, but if the rest of the series truly does put the beginning volumes to shame it will have to be quite mind blowing indeed. Review coming when I finish the series.

I've had a fairly mixed experience with Hamilton. He's written scenes and arcs that I've loved, and scenes and arcs that I've hated, and so far I've yet to read a book he's written without at least one of each. This, his debut, is a rather different beast. It's far more focused than his later works, though fans of the author's imagination will probably not be disappointed by it here, even if his creations are a tad reigned in. Still, I'm so far unconvinced that the Greg Mandel novels are capable of the same highs as the Night's Dawn trilogy. I suppose Hamilton's still got two books to prove me wrong. Review coming when I finish the trilogy.

 Noctuary is a quieter, subtler work than Songs of a Dead Dreamer was, though it's not quite as refined as Teatro Grottesco. Perhaps the most interesting part of the collection was the final part of three, a collection of a good deal of Ligotti's flash fiction. Besides those miniature tales, Conversations in a Dead Language proved to be my favorite of the collection, a devastatingly sad tale that's fairly unique in Ligotti's catalog. Review coming.

 I think it's pretty well established by now that I read Ligotti's work twice, and Noctuary was no exception. On second read, slower building tales like The Medusa and The Tsalal came into their own.

City of Ruin reads like a supercharged version of Nights of Villjamur, expanding on the strengths of that first novel and patching up many of its weaknesses – though that is not to say that it fixes all of the debut's problems. Review coming.

 This is the kind of book where you finish and then have to mull over what you've read for hours, reveling in the spell woven on you. Palmer's writing is excellent, and his story's deliciously bittersweet. Though it had some pacing problems, The Dream of Perpetual Motion is an excellent read. Highly recommended, just don't expect anything even approaching typical.

 To make sure that, after my rather scathing review of Frankenstein, I hadn't simply lost all affinity for classic horror, I went back and reread a dozen or so of Poe's finer tales and  found them just as fine the second time around (though, to be fair, it's closer to the fourth or fifth for a few). While I can't say that I'm as devout a follower of Poe as I am of Lovecraft, his mastery is undeniable.  The Masque of the Red Death, in particular, is pitch perfect, a bare handful of pages that couldn't be improved by a collaboration of the genre's top artists given a decade to improve as much as a single image.

 I was excited going into Frankenstein. No, really, I wasn't setting out to spear the classics. I was expecting a stunning read, a book that showed the origins of one of my favorite genres, a book that scared me, a book that made me think. Instead, I ended up bitterly disappointed. Review here.

Catherynne M. Valente's prose is versatile and opulent, and her writing is a tide of images that bears hapless readers to distant, often beautiful and often traumatizing, shores. Ventriloquism is a spellbinding collection, and, since much of its contents can be found online, there's no reason at all to not go immerse yourself in some of Valente's short fiction. Review coming.

Reading in October

Generally a good month, starting some interesting series and wrapping up some others, as well as quite a few collections and stand alones. No Breaking New Ground books this time around, but I haven't abandoned those and will fit in some more next month.


Daniel Abraham is fast becoming, in my opinion, the ultimate unsung hero of epic fantasy. Tor never published a paperback version of The Price of Spring, and yet The Long Price was a series almost unmatched for its decisive pacing and marvelous, evolving characterization. Leviathan Wept, a collection of Abraham’s short fiction, lives up to the lofty expectations any reader of his previous work no doubt has. Review coming.


Close this tab. I’ve heard that Barker – close this tab – is a master of horror for years, and this (closethistab) is the first work of his that I’ve read. I’m closethistab more confused than awed, though. As far as I can tell shutoffyourbrowser this is a fairly standard, meandering and unexciting novel, albeit occasionally an amusing one, that’s rendered almost unbearable by the book’s nonstop begging (don’t read the rest) for you to put it down, putting you in the mood to do nothing so much as throw the book at the wall and yell (one last chance, close this tab): Alright, Mr. Barker, I think I will!


Jonathon Strange & Mr Norrell is a beautifully written novel. It’s more than a little meander happy, but excellent nonetheless. This is one of the very rare books that I can seriously call delightful every time I open it up. Not perfect, no, but dazzling enough to make up for that.


The Passage, at least in terms of marketing, seems like this year’s big novel. I did enjoy it, but I didn’t love it. Review coming.


My first Sherlock Holmes story is a success. Despite some pacing problems, I’m already looking forward to reading more of Doyle’s stories. Review coming.


The Halfmade World ran roughshod over my expectations. I was expecting good, very good even, and it delivered great. Comparing The Halfmade World to Thunderer is like comparing night and day. And that’s coming from someone who really liked Thunderer. Review coming.


I really, really love some aspects of Hamilton’s writing. And I really, really hate some other aspects. Judas Unchained seems to have magnified just about every good and bad tendency of its creators, and my opinion is mixed, though I did enjoy the read. Review of it and Pandora’s Star coming.


I always find M.R. James’s writing to be engrossing, but the reason isn’t the scare factor. There is something about James’s style, part formal antique and part colloquial, that makes me feel like the man is sitting across from me, telling me his experiences first hand. That isn’t, by the way, to suggest that these stories are tame. There are a few that the reader desensitized by the loudness and often excessiveness of modern horror will, sadly, find a bit hard to feel the horror of (I think the modern standard is for the doll’s to brutally murder at least three people; wood replaying old tragedies in the night simply isn’t bloody enough), but there are no weak stories here…

Except for the first tale in the collection, The Residence at Whitminister, which, for some reason, I found almost impenetrable. I’m not sure if this is a result of James’s writing or simply me being unused to his style after a long hiatus, but a reread did not solve the problem, and I’m left with a collection of out of order facts and occurrences without the slightest emotional thread to tie them together.


Newton’s debut is ambitious, well written, and not without the occasional flaw. Review here.


I loved The Folding Knife, and I went into The Engineer Trilogy with very, very high expectations. Devices and Desires is very good, and has quite a few very interesting elements, but it also has a few aspects that I’m more hesitant upon. All the same, I’m looking forward to starting Evil for Evil in a few days. Review coming when I finish the trilogy.

Mark Charan Newton - Nights of Villjamur

Every detail mattered to her. It could be the difference between dying and getting home to Villjamur. (p. 3)

Striving to be a fusion of Epic Fantasy grandeur and New Weird aesthetic, it could never be said that Nights of Villjamur is not an ambitious novel. Though all of the various strands do not always come together as they should, this is still a powerful novel that has just enough experimentation to feel fresh and bold while still never venturing too far from the beaten path.

The core of Nights of Villjamur is the city of Villjamur and the world around it. Newton uses two techniques to make his settings feel real and vibrant. The first is his prose. Newton’s writing is highly descriptive, packing a multitude of details into tight paragraphs that have to be unraveled carefully lest the intricacies of the image be lost. He guides these descriptions with about faces that give the story a cinematic feel, twisting our view around just as we begin to comprehend what we’re seeing:

Back across the city.

Lanterns were being lit by citizens who perhaps had expected a brighter day. Glows of orange crept through the dreary morning, defining the shapes of elaborate windows, wide octagons, narrow arches. It had been a winter of bistros with steamed-up windows, of tundra flowers trailing down from hanging baskets, of constant plumes of smoke from chimneys, one where concealed gardens were dying, starved of sunlight, and where the statues adorning once-flamboyant balconies were no suffocating under lichen. (p. 15)

Villjamur has a very different feel from many fantasy cities. Newton’s setting is not traditional fantasy, but rather dying earth, taking place in the distant future rather than the imagined past. The juxtaposition between the seemingly all powerful cultist relics and the swords and bows of the military is an excellent and bizarre one, a dynamic further enforced by Newton’s diction. Newton sprinkles his prose with modern terminology; generally, this gives the setting a unique feel and twists the descriptions into a new light, though the word choice, on occasion, borders on sticking out too much: It seemed only a talented archer stood a chance of deleting one from the skies. (p. 18)

The second way that Newton brings his setting to life is his characters. The players in Newton’s story are a diverse lot, and they start in all manner of places, some closely connected with their peers and others entirely apart. Each of these characters is given their own life, filling the story with motion in the form of plots and subplots, all competing against the strains of day to day life.

Amidst all of that, the main thrust of Nights of Villjamur is hard to detect, but that is, perhaps, the point. There’s no single direction or threat that the characters face. The world is crumbling around them, but each once perceives the threat that they face in a different way, each struggles against a different foe, each tries live their life in their own way.

The disparate characters are the greatest strength of Nights of Villjamur. Though there are not, by epic fantasy standards, any great number of them, the even handedness with which they are all treated render each storyline interesting in the reader’s eye, and each tale reinforces the other, even without always having the various player’s direct presence. Brynd’s work to defend Villjamur is more meaningful because we know that Eir is inside, living a wholly unrelated life, and the multitudes that Inspector Jerryd sees around him are given character by the hint of Randur Estevu’s presence among them, leaving us believing that each of those that we see around us has their own story to tell.

Unfortunately, the various characters are also the novel’s biggest weakness. With so many plot threads, it’s hard for any of them to stand out, and no one threat or crisis ever seems particularly urgent or paramount. One of the book’s first chapters features Brynd and his elite Night Guard being ambushed and suffering bad losses. The events come on so suddenly, though, that the reader can’t really grasp them as they happen in real time. Then, next chapter, we’re with Jeryd, living an entirely separate existence with no thought to spare for the soldiers. When Brynd comes back we learn that the loss was almost unprecedented, tragedy and debacle in one, but by then it’s too late, and the reader’s hard pressed to give the events the importance they deserve in light of the fact that no one else in the city seems to care.

Beyond that, some of the various sub plots simply function less well than others. The mystery, in particular, falls far short of the standards established by the rest of the book. The killer is obvious from the book’s opening, but fine, maybe it’s more about how Jerryd pieces the puzzle together than it is about the exact identity of the killer. Halfway through the book, Jerryd figures out the killer: Suddenly he remembered how the suspect…[did something incriminating]. (p. 236) He does nothing for a hundred or so pages. Then he figures out the killer again: “Damn,” Jeryd repeated, and sat back in his chair. He laughed, his tail thrashing form side to side. “How stupid of me. All the time I’ve been telling myself it wasn’t [name] (p. 304) and decides to go do something about it. Er, excuse me? What just happened – or, better yet didn’t happen – in those intervening pages?

Newton doesn’t aim low when he lists influences, and a writer that cites authors like Vance and Mieville as influences has a lot to live up to. When it comes to reaching those great heights, Newton doesn’t hold back. The results are, however, mixed. Much has been made of the supposed combination of New Weird and Epic Fantasy that forms this book. Now, it’s true that the combination is in play, but the Weird elements are primarily used as flavoring, here. The city of Villjamur is multifaceted, but the various plots that unfold within it are, generally, of a more save the world from the evil [name]! than, say, Iron Council.

Which is, mind you, not a negative. The majority of the bizarre elements are worked in so closely to the characters that they come off as totally natural, such as the Rumels that form up much of the city’s population, or the enhanced prowess of the Night Guard. Contrasting against those are the remnants of the prior age (our own?), which stick out so strongly against the rest of Newton’s world that they create depressions around them in which everything else seems dull and blunt compared to their powers, a slideshow suddenly looking drab when compared with a motion picture. The reader’s reaction to the cultist’s relics is the same as many of the characters – one of awe and apprehension – and the chapters from a cultist viewpoint are some of the most interesting in the book.

Of course, Mieville is not renowned solely for his settings. Newton’s treatment of theme is, again, mixed. He brings up interesting issues, but we rarely see them examined in anything but the most perfunctory of manners. Much of the book is concerned with the vast hordes of refugees crowding Villjamur’s gates, pleading to get in, but they also happen to be an indistinct mass, a blur of undiscribed faces and unknown mannerisms. Lacking a character who lives among them, or even one who spends more time than just their respective climax worrying about them, the refugees are hard to really feel for, rendering any point that has their survival as its delivery mechanism half cocked at best.

When dealing with smaller matters, however, Newton is far more successful. I’ve already talked about the characters, but what makes them so fascinating is their personal, not professional, lives. The intersection between work and pleasure, life and duty, is an interesting area, and every time Newton’s characters are interrupted on a journey the book becomes that much more colorful and interesting:

He turned, sniffed the chill air, began to walk away –
- A snowball slapped his head. (p. 154)

It’s odd, in a way, for the mundane to be the primary fulfillment of the book’s high aims, but it’s in the little details of his characters’ lives that Newton sets himself apart from authors that can handily string up a paper king and a cardboard vizier and have the two battle it out with improbably large weapons.

Nights of Villjamur’s strengths and weaknesses are so intertwined that it’s hard to imagine a version of it without either of them. Though this is a flawed novel, it’s still both an interesting experiment and a good read, and I’m looking forward to seeing how Newton develops what he’s established in City of Ruin.

The Book of Transformations [Cover Art]

Mark Charan Newton's third book has had an interesting history when it comes to cover art. Evidently, we internet folks get a bit more sway than we thought, because we were first presented with two choices to chose from:














Unfortunately for Mr. Newton, the consensus seemed to be: neither of them. And that's where things get surprising. On Westeros, Newton said:

Anyway, just to show the power of the internet, for the hardcover we're looking to have the character removed completely and work on the city. Hardcovers are a totally different market to the mass market reader (the casual reader who shapes careers, and they look for something different to the rest of us in cover design), so maybe we were wrong in choosing a figure for that.

But if it tanks, you all owe me a drink.

The result? Right here:


Somehow, I don't think we're going to have to all chip in for Newton's next pitcher. That thing is freakin' gorgeous.

City of Ruin [Cover Art]

I'm...not a fan. The paperback cover of Nights of Villjamur, at least, still had dignity and, to some extent, grace. This, on the other hand, feels coarse and wholly lacking in subtlty or atmosphere. Thankfully, the hardback cover is far superior. And, speaking of Newton, I really do need to read some of his work...

Up and Coming (and Essential?) in June

Wait…didn’t this one already come out? Well, yes, it did, for those of you not stupid enough to preorder the paperbook months ago. I don’t know why I occasionally pretend I have self control, but I sometimes get the urge to play make believe, and as a result I have to wait for months and months to get to read something that looks excellent to me. So, while you were all waiting for City of Ruin, I was checking my mailbox for a slightly smaller, softer package. If you, like me, still haven’t gotten to this, there are countless excellent reviews to stir up some longing.

This is, as far as I can tell, an epic SF vampire epic, reminiscent of the Stand. Well, god damn, I need to read that. Spurring that growing need on is Wert’s glowing review. Cronin also talks briefly about the books genesis here.

I loved Gaiman's Neverwhere and have been itching to explore more of his work ever since. Stories, of course, has more than just Gaiman, and the rest of the cast is just as exciting. The same Joe Hill whose 20th Century Ghosts I just fell in love with? And - could that be? - Gene Wolfe? An interesting and promising lineup for sure, an alluring fact only aided by the Speculative Scotsman's review.


This is like those threads on music forums, where you construct your Dream Band. Or, to use a more relevant analogy, it’s like those threads on Westeros where you construct your own ideal small council/war council/kingsguard/privy-construction team, and this book is like Tywin, Littlefinger, and Kellhus occupying all the positions in perfect harmony and sending out an army of dragons to go roast dissenters. How can you possibly complain about a table of contents this strong? Well, I guess you could if the stories are shit. On that count, there’ve been some mixed reports, so far. Pat’s comments so far in this Westros thread have been fairly negative, while Aidan’s put up a few quite positive reviews of individual pieces (Lynch and Abercrombie, to be precise). I guess time, and personal taste, will tell.