Maybe the point is the failure of stories. The book slips from one story to the next. The individual scenes are all fascinating to read and the characters and world are intriguing, but I was just missing a point to it all. It seems to follow the literary movement of decadence that delights in perversion, while maintaining a highly erudite style. It is about an atmosphere of obsession and decay. And I suspect that is all there is to it. It is both miserable and beautiful in its decadence and vileness. The characters are layered and the writing is beautiful. It’s an unusual novel, a literate, dark fantasy that requires close reading. She tries to escape the city and the story itself by rewriting them through her etchings. This character is Beth and she accidentally finds herself in Ashamoil and also in this world, as if she was pulled into the book from the outside.

Gwynn finds a higher purpose in a love affair with a crazy artist who might be more than human. Gwynn follows an amoral path by becoming a hired bodyguard for a rich slave master and at night he argues his nihilism with a lecherous, alcoholic priest, who tries to convert Gwynn out of his atheism as an atonement for his own sins. Raule, a former field surgeon, ends up working for a church-run hospital in the poorer neighborhoods and is confronted by women giving birth to malformed foetuses, some of them part crocodile. We don’t see the characters together much after this, which is weird because most fantasy books start out with multiple POVs which come together in time, but this book works the opposite way.

Raule and Gwynn end up in the sweltering city Ashamoil and start new lives for themselves. But where is this story going? It seems aimless. Sometimes it is hypnotic, taking in the sun and landscapes, and at other times it is sharp and arresting in moments of sudden fear and danger. We drift from scene to scene where the journeys through the deserts fuse with troubled dreams and mirages. Raule left her revolutionary past behind her she managed to fade away, but “in more ways than one, and more than she intended to.”Īs the characters wander, so does the story. Now, they are drifters, hiding, scraping a living, wandering across desert landscapes from dusty town to dusty town without a real plan for the future. Raule and Gwynn used to be revolutionaries, until the great general defeated them. Positives and negatives are both in the extreme.

Rating: conflicted/10 – maybe a 7.5/10 in the end.

The Etched City by K.J. Bishop