Traveler, Cleric, Witch.

The villagers in the sleepy hamlet of Lychford are divided. A supermarket wants to build a major branch on their border. Some welcome the employment opportunities, while some object to the modernization of the local environment.
Judith Mawson (local crank) knows the truth -- that Lychford lies on the boundary between two worlds, and that the destruction of the border will open wide the gateways to malevolent beings beyond imagination.
But if she is to have her voice heard, she's going to need the assistance of some unlikely allies...

This is another novella from Tor I discovered during my novella-binge earlier in the year. I read it a couple of weeks ago, but as I am currently reading the sequel, I figured now's the time for the review.

The Story:

"Traveler, Cleric, Witch.
The villagers in the sleepy hamlet of Lychford are divided. A supermarket wants to build a major branch on their border. Some welcome the employment opportunities, while some object to the modernization of the local environment.
Judith Mawson (local crank) knows the truth -- that Lychford lies on the boundary between two worlds, and that the destruction of the border will open wide the gateways to malevolent beings beyond imagination.
But if she is to have her voice heard, she's going to need the assistance of some unlikely allies..."

Disclaimer

I did not receive an ARC for this book, but I did for the sequel, The Lost Child of Lychford, which prompted me to read this novella. Also, I am a little disappointed at the author's use of blocklists on Twitter. Those may both be factors that influenced this review, so keep those in mind.

The Review:

Witches of Lychford entered my field of vision back in January when I was on my novella binge and checked Tor's various offerings. When I found an eARC of the sequel, The Lost Child of Lychford, in my mailbox, I figured I should give it a go - and found something genuinely amusing and exciting.

The story kicks off with the old, witchy Judith walking the town of Lychford. She enters the stage leaving no doubt of her eccentricity; she swears, she professes her dislike for people, and she finds that something very bad is going on in the town she watches over - besides a giant corporation trying to build a new supermarket and ruffling feathers left and right, literally splitting the town's population in half over the issue.
Judith, with all her sharp edges and odd manners, is a joy to read. She has her way, and has long since stopped giving a damn about what others think of her. Of course, that sees her shunned by the other residents, which makes her attempts to prevent Lychford's doom a little difficult.

Following on, Cornell introduces the second "Witch" of Lychford, Reverend Lizzie Blackmore, who just recently returned to the small town to become the new vicar of Lychford's church. Her troubles are immediately apparent. Throughout the book, she has a bit of an identity problem, related to her faith. While she finally got her dream job, she is wavering, and struggles to get back in touch with her old friend, Autumn.

Autumn, Lizzie comes to learn, opened a witchcraft store in town, despite her strong atheistic tendencies. She, too, has a troubled past, though of an entirely different kind than Lizzie. And yes, she is the third Witch of the book, rounding off the trio.

I was less interested in Autumn here, due to her (past) romance plotline and her being more of a social butterfly. She was written well, but Lizzie's trauma and Judith's situation back at home and her standing in the community appealed to me more. Still, all three of them had their parts to play (albeit that Lizzie's was less active than that of the other two, something she herself remarks upon later), and complemented one another exceptionally well.
Autumn tended to bring a more rational, semi-scientific angle to the table whereas Lizzie tried to use faith instead, half to convince herself of it than to find a solution. Both had to confront their own biases more than once, and accept that there is more between heaven and hell than they'd have previously thought.
Judith meanwhile fulfills the role of old wise woman who has seen it all and knows what's up but has never gotten around to having an apprentice - so of course she'd recruit these two.

With the trio being written so lively and genuinely funny, with Judith mocking the others all over and the other two's various reactions or attitudes, I was happy to spend time with them, and would like more stories to be written about them and Lychford. Thankfully, there's already one sequel coming up.

The conflict within the story mostly arises from Lychford's spiritual borders weakening and the town tearing itself apart over the supermarket situation. The witches have to find a solution to both problems, with clever tricks and magic and all you'd expect. The antagonist comes in the form of the big corporation and how streamlined systems like store chains disrupt the calm of tradition and community life in favor of profits and convenience. I liked that. While the sentiment may be as old as modern capitalism, meshing it with a world of magic and eccentricity worked well and provided a good basis for the narrative.

Witches of Lychford was a great read. It offered capable, quirky protagonists, a well-developed dilemma and a lot of mystery and subtle magic. It made me laugh and had me read it almost in one go. It has a few themes that could have been explored a little more, but overall was satisfying and relaxing, despite the doom and gloom. The witches feel like good people, and certainly are good company for the reader.

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Buried beneath the layers of a traveler's guide is a hidden history: two kingdoms, powerful gems, and the even more powerful Lapidarys who bind them. Lin and Sima, caught in a web of intrigue and deceit, must find a way to escape the traps set by the past and save their kingdom.
An epic fantasy, in miniature.

The tagline "An epic fantasy, in miniature" is true in a way, but also worked to the story's detriment in my opinion. I had to go over it twice, and both times similar things annoyed me about it. Here's my review.

The Story:

"Buried beneath the layers of a traveler's guide is a hidden history: two kingdoms, powerful gems, and the even more powerful Lapidarys who bind them. Lin and Sima, caught in a web of intrigue and deceit, must find a way to escape the traps set by the past and save their kingdom.
An epic fantasy, in miniature."

The Review:

The Jewel and Her Lapidary is a very brief story. Now, I don't have anything against that in principle, but in this case I don't think that the author handled the limitations of the format well. Ms. Wilde certainly has some great ideas that I'd like to see explored, or would've liked to see explored here, but they fell noticeably short as a result of the story's short length and odd priorities.

In a nutshell, the plot is about the noble "Jewel" Lin and her "Lapidary" servant Sima, who are captured while the King's Lapidary is overthrowing his master to hand the magic jewels of the kingdom to an invading force. With Lin and Sima being the daughters of both king and betrayer respectively, there is quite a bit of emotional dilemma right off the bat. Throughout the story we are told of the strong bond between Jewels and their Lapidaries, and Sima struggles all throughout with maintaining her oaths to Lin without betraying or forsaking her - which leads to quite a conundrum when Lin orders her to leave her behind and wrapped in magically-weird chain garment that'd somehow prevent Lin from being married off to the invading general's son.

That part I found intriguing and enjoyable as a concept. But then we also have the magic gems which apparently speak to Lapidaries, and without training this drives those skilled individuals mad - which, despite experience and training, apparently happened to Sima's father. Sadly, this isn't explored nearly as well as it needed to be. The powers of the Star Cabochon, Opaque Sapphire and the other, less powerful jewels in Sima's care, weren't well developed. A lot more could have been done with them - but then I also accept that the story was more about the mistress/servant/friend/sister relationship between Lin and Sima than the actual magic of the setting. It served the plot in places but took the backseat to the characters' distress.

I wouldn't have had too much of a problem with that if, throughout the story, snippets from a tourguide book (written far in the future) didn't hint at a much wider, more interesting setting than the book focused on. Almost the entire story takes place in the King Jewel's palace, or in captivity (with three different instances of being caught, no less). There were so many hints at a greater whole of which we only see a tiny fraction that I got frustrated.

On top of that, I struggled with the repetitive nature of various phrases and terminology. Calling the royalty Jewels and their bonded servants with mystical powers Lapidaries is a cool idea, but when you get actual magic jewels, gems and lapidaries, things get quickly out of hand. Having Sima constantly think "A lapidary must/musn't do X or Y", over and over and over, made me sick of reading the same words over and over and I have to wonder just how much of the word count was taken up by the same concepts. Sure, it hammers the inner turmoil of the servant home, but at some point the reader understands that and wants it to be expressed differently.

Then there was a glimmer of romance between Lin and Sima, which was dropped almost as soon as it arose. While I can easily put it down to the stress of the overall situation, being in captivity together and not having anybody else to rely on or support, it felt like a missed opportunity. The moment could have broken the master/servant relationship, for example, or shaken up the ending in some fashion.

The ending twist at least I thought to be quite imaginative if cruel and grim. It was exciting, if very abrupt in terms of pacing. Something was missing there, but thinking about it, it brings Sima's dilemma to a satisfying conclusion. However, there were a bunch of things that were left open, or abandoned, that left me wondering. It did not feel like a complete story in a sense; it deserved more room to maneuver and develop its unique ideas. Epic fantasy in miniature indeed, and that makes me a little sad.

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Brute force has failed – and drastically so. The assault on the ork home world has ended in disaster and new tactics are needed. But will Koorland's new force – his so-called ""Deathwatch"" be effective?

The attempt to hunt down and kill the orks’ leader has ended in catastrophe. The Imperium is reeling from the loss of so many beloved heroes, and the military forces of mankind have been reduced to tatters. Koorland now knows that brute force is not the answer – but how else can the orks be fought? In a radical move, he creates small, mixed Chapter units of Adeptus Astartes – compact teams that will hit the enemy hard and fast, and with deadly accuracy. With armour painted the black of mourning, the new strike teams become known as the Deathwatch. But will this be enough to tip the balance, or does the Imperium need to discover other new means to defeat the orks?

Nine done, three more books to go. The Beast Arises isn't going to let us go straight to the finish line, however, so here's another curveball flung at followers of the series, courtesy of David Annandale. This is his third and final book in the series, which means a full quarter of it sprung from his keyboard!

The Story:

"Brute force has failed – and drastically so. The assault on the ork home world has ended in disaster and new tactics are needed. But will Koorland's new force – his so-called ""Deathwatch"" be effective?

The attempt to hunt down and kill the orks’ leader has ended in catastrophe. The Imperium is reeling from the loss of so many beloved heroes, and the military forces of mankind have been reduced to tatters. Koorland now knows that brute force is not the answer – but how else can the orks be fought? In a radical move, he creates small, mixed Chapter units of Adeptus Astartes – compact teams that will hit the enemy hard and fast, and with deadly accuracy. With armour painted the black of mourning, the new strike teams become known as the Deathwatch. But will this be enough to tip the balance, or does the Imperium need to discover other new means to defeat the orks?"

The Review:

Watchers in Death was quite enjoyable to me. It suffers from some contrivances of the overall series, but the overall story was a satisfying origin piece for the Deathwatch and their particular style of engagement.

Firstly, though, the cover presents a discrepancy with the book's content. The Deathwatch marine shown is wearing an Inquisition-branded shoulder guard, whereas in the book, the Deathwatch are autonomous. They are allying with Inquisitors Veritus and Wienand, but over the course of the book the two merely discuss the possibilities inherent in the new Space Marine formation, foreshadowing future developments. But at the book's present, the Deathwatch is not a militant chamber of the Inquisition yet, and is under the sole direction of Chapter Master Koorland of the Imperial Fists, with Maximus Thane of the Fists Exemplar as his second.

The whole creation myth of the Watchers in Death was interesting to follow, especially seeing the animosity between Dark Angels and Space Wolves, and how that takes the backseat as the Kill Teams get more invested into their role as new elite strikeforce. In general, I felt that Annandale did a bang-on job depicting how the various Astartes grew into their new identities. It was moving in places, and neat to see how Deathwatch and Chapter origin could coexist.

Deathwatch. The word, the name, the truth was shouted by every warrior in the Monitus. It was the moment of creation. That which had been shattered on Ullanor had taken on a new shape, renewed of purpose.
Deathwatch. It was a blade aimed at the throat of the Beast.

A big woe of mine was that, once more, this was pretty much limited to the usual bunch of Chapters. Imperial Fists/Fists Exemplar in the leaders Koorland and Thane, Space Wolves, Dark Angels, Blood Angels and Ultramarines. We knew the Salamanders took part in the assault on Ullanor, but none of them seemed to join the DW. Neither did the infiltration specialists of the Raven Guard make an appearance, or any of the successor Chapters beyond the Fists Exemplar. It was a meek turnout, and seeing how the diversity of Chapters and their individual tactics are perhaps the biggest strength of the Deathwatch to come, this seemed too vanilla for my taste. It ticked the necessary boxes based on previously involved Chapters, but didn't go beyond, which it well could have.

Either way, the Kill Teams go on to finally deal with the attack moon above Terra, which is a plotline I would have liked to see tackled a few volumes ago. Thankfully, there is some finality here, as the Deathwatch come into their own. Where The Hunt for Vulkan and The Beast Must Die were stuffed with big action setpieces, Watchers in Death focused more on small groups of combatants, which was a needed change of pace and delivered something notably different from the rest of the series with its massive scale.

About half the book deals with another hunt for a legendary leftover force from the Great Crusade and Horus Heresy era: The Sisters of Silence. Like with Vulkan before, it is Veritus who divulges the secret of their continued existence. I thought that too typical. Using Veritus again might make sense considering his position, but it was also a bit of a cheap way to handle it. I keep wondering if much would have changed had Wienand found an old dusty tome instead, while Koorland dealt with the attack moon. If anything, that might have benefitted the book by exploring the Inquisition's customs a bit more, and had been more emergent from the events of TBMD, whereas Veritus just has a "oh, by the way, I know this and that" moment. Doing it the way I suggest here would also have made a stronger case for later events to turn out the way they did, involving the two Inquisitors.

But thankfully, we are back to Terra for half of the book. There are politics to be watched unfold again, from the proposal of the Deathwatch's establishment over power play predictions and the Inquisition's scheming. Mesring's role developed a little further, as did Juskina Tull, and even the uneasy relationship between Koorland and Fabricator General Kubik. Vangorich, too, has a chance to spread his influence directly again, which was welcome. His role has been moving to the back lately, whereas I still consider him the true star of the series, for (soon to be) obvious reasons.

However, the story soon moves on to Thane and his Kill Team searching for the long-lost and forgotten Sisters of Silence, guided by the Inquisitors. This was fascinating in a way, but also a little disjointed and could have benefitted from more pagetime and switching back to Terra once in a while.
I'd like to note though that I do not in theory object to the Sisters only entering the stage now. After all, their relevance was only clear to the reader, not the characters. Or rather, the characters who found out about the threat of the Ork psykers took quite a beating in past volumes and their messages only reached Terra now, after the disaster at Ullanor. So, in a way, while Vulkan hinted at the Sisters coming in handy, nobody knew why he'd say that, or that they still endured.
While yes, this drags the series out, it feels like more natural progression resulting from previous novels' plotlines finally developing further.

The individual Deathwatch missions were enjoyable to follow and had some pretty cool moments, especially involving ork-derived technology. If I have one criticism though, it is how comparatively easy their jobs were. Their success was always a given, seeing how their concept gives birth to a full force in the future, but even then, there was a surprising lack of losses and hard choices involved. That could have been handled better, even though the action scenes and infiltration sections were well executed.

A relatively small part of the novel also returns us to Captain Zerberyn of the Fists Exemplar and Iron Warriors Warsmith Kalkator. I won't spoil this part, because it was incredibly good, and showed the inner turmoil of the loyalist captain, and is foreshadowing some big reckoning. I loved this section.

In the end though, this was a solid entry in the series. I had a good time. Some memorable scenes came from the formation of the Watchers, which I remember fondly. A few tweaks could have made it better, but even without them it holds up and brings us one step close to the series' completion.

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Inquisitor Covenant must hunt down the daemon at the heart of a planetary conspiracy, but how high a price will he and his team pay to defeat the evil, and are they even aware what the cost of success will be?

While the Space Marines and the Imperial Guard fight the myriad alien enemies that seek to overwhelm mankind, the Inquisition pursues a different kind of war. For theirs is a war fought in the dark places of man’s soul – a battle against the corruption of Chaos, a battle for the survival of humanity. Inquisitor Covenant must hunt down the daemon at the heart of a planetary conspiracy, but how high a price will he and his team pay to defeat the evil, and are they even aware what the cost of success will be?

This short story released in this year's Summer of Reading over at Black Library, and made me very happy. It seems they're turning it around with more creative and conceptually clever stories, so I felt the need to review this one quickly. It's quite a short review, I know, but I'd like to recommend this one anyway, without spoiling the fun in it.

The Story:

"Inquisitor Covenant must hunt down the daemon at the heart of a planetary conspiracy, but how high a price will he and his team pay to defeat the evil, and are they even aware what the cost of success will be?

While the Space Marines and the Imperial Guard fight the myriad alien enemies that seek to overwhelm mankind, the Inquisition pursues a different kind of war. For theirs is a war fought in the dark places of man’s soul – a battle against the corruption of Chaos, a battle for the survival of humanity. Inquisitor Covenant must hunt down the daemon at the heart of a planetary conspiracy, but how high a price will he and his team pay to defeat the evil, and are they even aware what the cost of success will be? "

The Review:

The Purity of Ignorance's subtitle as "A story of the Horusian Wars" is a misnomer in my eyes. There really is nothing about the Horusians here, or even inter-factional conflict within the Inquisition. I am a bit disappointed with that, since this seemed like a start to a new trilogy, or even series, focusing on Inquisitors. However, I am still pleased with how the story itself turned out, besides the cover's marketing.

This is the first story of hopefully many to feature Inquisitor Covenant, an old character from the Inquisitor specialist game. It doesn't exactly put him into the spotlight, but it is an impressive introduction to the man and his retainers. There's a preacher, a warrior-woman with ties to the Adepta Sororitas, and an array of stormtroopers in service of the big man. The squad leader, lieutenant Ianthe, is the primary focus here. She is being recruited for her first job with the Inquisition, and initially interrogated, before we get to see her and her squad in action. From this basic premise arises a very cool story that is conceptually great and well executed.

The antagonists are well written too, and while fans of the IP will know the twist right from the start, it is well handled and shows the core of corruption in an exciting way. Nobody plays the villain in their own mind, and French plays well with that idea here.

More than anything though, this type of story with all its twists and clever ideas is what I have been missing from Black Library in recent years. If this is the stuff we can expect more of going forward, then I am all in again. Let John write more about Covenant and co, because this was a highly promising start to something that grow into Eisenhorn/Ravenor-levels of Inquisitorial goodness.

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Five noble war heroes of Vagandrak get drunk one night and sign a contract – to journey to the Karamakkos in search of the Five Havens where, it is written, there is untold, abandoned wealth and, more importantly, the three Dragon Heads – jewels claimed to give unspeakable power and everlasting life to those who wield them.

But the Dragon Heads aren’t what they think, and the world has not encountered their like in generations!

This one is a highly divisive novel, which I didn't realize going in. Not for the faint-hearted or prude, that's for sure. However, I quite enjoyed it.

The Story:

"Five noble war heroes of Vagandrak get drunk one night and sign a contract – to journey to the Karamakkos in search of the Five Havens where, it is written, there is untold, abandoned wealth and, more importantly, the three Dragon Heads – jewels claimed to give unspeakable power and everlasting life to those who wield them.

But the Dragon Heads aren’t what they think, and the world has not encountered their like in generations!"

The Review:

The Dragon Engine is a controversial novel - and for good reason. It is full of adult humor (or juvenile humor, depending on who you're asking), and explicit, sexual content (both in the positive and negative sense).
So if you are uncomfortable with that, do not even think of picking this book up, or you'll regret the money spent. If you're unsure, get the sample, which should include the start of the chapter "Skalg", which tackles the reader with some very explicit scenes right off the bat.

If you can get over those explicit contents, you'll find a novel that very much resembles a Dungeons & Dragons campaign. The protagonists are a diverse bunch, three men, three women, including a bisexual archer, a supposedly-pacifist witch/healer who is also vegetarian, a ginger, one-eyed, stubborn axeman and so on. It really covers a bunch of the tropes and character classes you'd find in most pen & paper roleplaying games, with the added bonus of all of these six characters being veterans of a previous war (which seems to be covered in Remic's other books). As a result you have them wax nostalgically about the good old days and past glories, and decide to go on one last adventure together.

This adventure sees them going on a treasure hunt, searching for the lost dwarven cities under the mountain Karamakkos. Things don't go as planned (at all), even from the outset, and the group of heroes just tumbles from one problem to the next.
I actually found that really entertaining, as it resulted in a lot of comedic problem solving - until about halfway through the book, when they actually enter the dwarven realm and things take a massive turn for the worst.

Spoiler, highlight to read!

The group gets captured and put to slave labor in the mines of the thought-extinct race. But since they weren't compliant enough, they go through a very long chapter of torture, which sent each and every one of them through hell. This involves mutilation, threat of castration and ball-crushing, psycho-terror, rape and more.

It really wasn't pretty and, again, if you're faint-hearted, move on.

However, it did provide some very neat insights into the characters. For the most part the book focuses on Beetrax the axeman, and his past love with Lillith. We get the biggest chunks of background on them, whereas the others are less obvious in their background details. During their rough time in the Five Havens, all of them are confronted with their own fears and insecurities, and became more interesting to me. But then, I also hated those scenes for making me worry so much, and being utterly relentless. They were some of the moments where I genuinely wanted the antagonists to die in hell.

The antagonists themselves are well-established and actually evil, especially Cardinal Skalg of the Church of Hate, who is a despicable prick of the highest degree. There isn't really much I want to say about his role here, as it has a bunch of twists I don't want to spoil. But you will hate him. There is nothing redeemable about him, and there doesn't need to be. But then, few, if any, of the dwarves can be said good things about. They're an isolated race of awful people, selfish, brutal, hateful. Just the kind of mess you wouldn't want to run into.

And then we have the Dragon Engine itself, a machine utilizing enslaved metal dragons to power the dwarven cities. There isn't as much about this in the book as I was expecting, but when it hits, it is with a sledgehammer and turns the book upside down, with a gigantic cliffhanger for Twilight of the Dragons. I'm very excited to dig into that sequel, with how this story (hasn't) wrapped up here.

The Dragon Engine really is a mixed bag that will divide readers (and already has). There is sexually explicit content here in bucket loads, some relatively tasteful, other parts excessively detailed to the point where I was cringing, thinking that a curtain call would have fitted the scene better. Little is left ambiguous, and characters are foul-mouthed (especially Beetrax and the antagonists) throughout the whole book. But then, there are genuinely well-written human relationships here too, with the group of six splitting into three couples of different stages. There is plenty of humor here to balance the grim, though it takes second fiddle once things get darker in the mines. While some may react with eyerolls at Beetrax in particular, I thought him to be a well-presented character with more depth than immediately obvious, and often quite funny.

More than anything though, this book has made me want to play DnD. Getting a group together and just start a silly adventure with characters who poke fun at one another all the time, but also stick up for one another when it counts. If you told me this was originally based off of one long campaign Remic had with friends, I could well believe it, and it maintains the lighthearted tone of such sessions, despite the grim parts.

As such, I quite enjoyed my time with The Dragon Engine, though I cannot make a clear-cut recommendation for it. It really comes down to your own sensibilities and tastes, and state of mind. You might praise it for its unashamed style, or hate it for its crudeness. I can only recommend trying the sample to see if you can stomach it.

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