“A vibrant, textured, and exciting admixture of subgenres that do not often play together.” kagen the damned
KAGEN THE DAMNED
ORDINARY MONSTERS
Maberry, Jonathan St. Martin’s Griffin (560 pp.) $18.99 | May 10, 2022 978-1-250-78397-4
Miro, J.M. Flatiron Books (672 pp.) $28.99 | June 7, 2022 978-1-250-83366-2
In the first of a series, epic fantasy blends with eldritch horror and folklore as a man seeks vengeance for the destruction of an empire. Kagen Vale, sworn protector of the young heirs of the Silver Empress, awakens from a night of debauchery to discover himself naked and weaponless as the forces of the long-defeated Hakkians slaughter the royal family and conquer the Silver Empire in the course of a single night. Tormented by his failure to save his charges and by a vision of his nation’s gods literally turning their backs on him, the apparently damned man wanders the countryside in a drunken and murderous haze while nursing vengeance against the usurping Witch-king, a sorcerer and disciple of Hastur, the sinister Shepherd God. Both the Witch-king and a desperate rebellious cabal are seeking Kagen, the former to capture and humiliate him, the latter because they believe Kagen is key to defeating the Witch-king, whose ambitions threaten the whole world. Meanwhile, having lost the protection of their destroyed empire’s faith, two nuns seek the help of other, older gods. Lovecraft-ian pastiche remains a popular, some might say overused, subgenre, but it’s usually presented in a more contemporary or recent historical setting rather than a high fantasy milieu as it is here. Maberry also blends in the mythology of Robert Chambers’ The King in Yellow as well as references to Tennyson’s poem “The Lady of Shalott” and Keats’ “La Belle Dame sans Merci.” While it’s difficult to garner any sympathy for the Witch-king and the gruesome god he serves, the author offers a shades-of-gray approach to most of the story, suggesting that not all the worshippers of the other Great Old Ones are evil, that the Hakkians had at least some justification for rising up against the Silver Empire, and that the Silver Empire’s seemingly gentle Garden faith had some fairly ruthless underpinnings. Various characters warn Kagen and the reader that things are not always as they appear, and one of the stunning revelations at the end should probably be obvious, but that foreknowledge doesn’t prevent the novel’s thrilling denouement from striking like a hammer blow. A vibrant, textured, and exciting admixture of subgenres that do not often play together.
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1 may 2022
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fiction
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kirkus.com
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In Victorian London, two foundling boys with unusual talents find themselves at the center of an ancient battle between the worlds of the living and the dead. Charlie Ovid is a 16-year-old mixedrace orphan in Reconstruction-era Mississippi who has been convicted of murdering a White man. So far, he has been executed three times for his crime, but in spite of the nightly beatings inflicted upon him ever since, Charlie remains physically unscathed, his uncanny healing power a mystery even to himself. Marlowe is another orphan, found as a baby gently glowing in a freight train at a dead woman’s breast and raised by two adopted mother figures, the timid Eliza and the muscular, tattooed Brynt. “The shining boy,” as he comes to be called, is raised in the slums of London and then as part of a sideshow act in a traveling circus crisscrossing the American heartlands. His origins, his powers, and his fate are as much mysteries to him as Charlie’s cycle of suffering and healing, until they’re each visited by Frank Coulton and Alice Quicke, a detective duo employed to find remarkable children like Charlie and Marlowe and bring them back to the mysterious Cairndale Institute in the far north of Scotland, where they will be protected and trained in the uses of their powers. Cairndale, a labyrinthine manor house on the shores of a dark, fathomless loch, turns out to be as full of secrets as the children themselves, and Charlie and Marlowe— along with a Japanese dustworker named Komako; Ribs, the invisible girl; and shy Oskar and the flesh giant Lymenion who sleeps under his bed—must unravel the true motives of their inscrutable guardian, Dr. Henry Berghast, before Jacob Marber, a figure of tremendous power who used to be an unusual child just like them, can tear apart the seal between the worlds of the living and the dead. A fast-paced novel whose action and intrigue make short work of its daunting page count, this tome is clearly set up to be Book 1 of a larger series. However, while the world is intricate and the characters finely drawn, there is such a sheer volume of people, plotlines, backstories, and lore being introduced that the autonomy of the novel itself suffers. Epic in scope and size, this book sets itself up for many sequels to come.
