“I have a conscience, but it’s a feeble, withered shred of a thing. It couldn’t protect you or anyone else from a stiff breeze.” Glokta sighed, long and hard. . . “You could not even guess at the things I’ve done. Awful, evil, obscene, the telling of them alone could make you puke.” He shrugged. “They nag at me from time to time, but I tell myself I had good reasons. The years pass, the unimaginable becomes everyday, the hideous becomes tedious, the unbearable becomes routine. I push it all into the dark corners of my mind, and it’s incredible the room back there. Amazing what one can live with.”

• Title: Before They Are Hanged
• Author: Joe Abercrombie
• Genre: High Fantasy
• Year: 2007

Before They Are Hanged is book two of The First Law trilogy, and this review will contain spoilers of the first book. For my review of book one, The Blade Itself, click here.

Before They Are Hanged steps up the action by a considerable extent from The Blade Itself, as well as answering many of the questions that have been raised about the history of the Magi, Juvens and the Master Maker, and the rest of the backstory that sets up the present conflict. The plot alternates between three major threads; the war in the North that has the freshly promoted Colonel West and his new allies — Logen’s old northmen crew commanded by Threetrees — dealing with Bethold’s invasion in the face of bureaucracy, backstabbing, and incompetence on his own side, Inquisitor Glokta’s command of the hopeless defense of the distant city of Dagoska as it is besieged by the Gurkish Emperor’s forces, and the quest for the mysterious ‘seed’ that has Bayaz, Quai, Longfoot, Logen, Jezal, and Ferro journeying across the remnants of the Old Empire. It’s the stuff of High Fantasy: battles and sieges, quests for magic artifacts, inhuman enemies lurking in ancient cities — but, as in The Blade Itself, Abercrombie delights in skewing things a bit, doing the unexpected, and giving his fantasy a cynical, worldly slant that makes it distinctively different from run-of-the-mill fare.

Again, Abercrombie shows his skill in balancing his many threads and drawing them together, achieving a tightly-paced book. Like its predecessor, Before They Are Hanged is dialog-heavy and character-focused, and it’s the continued growth and revelation of Abercrombie’s characters that is the motive force driving the story forward. Things hinted at in The Blade Itself come into fuller fruition here, as characters are thrust into extremity and reveal themselves in conflict. West’s temper is uglier than we may have guessed, Bayaz’s pride may be of greater power than his judgment, Glokta’s conscience stirs to unexpected life — many of the central characters move in satisfying and interesting directions here, and it’s anyone’s guess just where each may end up.

Ultimately, whether a reader likes Before They Are Hanged depends on their opinion of The Blade Itself — and I can safely say that if you liked the first, you will like the second. Questions are answered and new ones raised, characters push and pull against one another, glimpses of plots are dangled with skill before the reader, and the whole conspires to keep the pages greedily turning — in short, everything is done well and will have fans rushing to get their hands on Last Argument of Kings, the concluding volume of The First Law.

• Before They Are Hanged at Amazon
• My review of The Blade Itself
• My review of Last Argument of Kings
  
• Joe Abercrombie’s website

“There are few men with more blood on their hands than me. None, that I know of. The Bloody-Nine they call me, my enemies, and there’s a lot of ‘em. Always more enemies, and fewer friends. Blood gets you nothing but more blood. It follows me now, always, like my shadow, and like my shadow I can never be free of it. I should never be free of it. I’ve earned it. I’ve deserved it. I’ve sought it out. Such is my punishment.”

• Title: The Blade Itself
• Author: Joe Abercrombie
• Genre: High Fantasy
• Year: 2006

The words above are spoken by Logen Ninefingers, an aging berserker champion rapidly losing his taste for violence, just one of the many smartly-drawn characters in the cast of The Blade Itself. Joe Abercrombie’s first book, and the start of a fantasy trilogy entitled The First Law, The Blade Itself is sometimes playfully referred to as ‘Low Fantasy’ for its subversion of the tropes of the traditional fat fantasy with its wizards, barbarians, quests, and warring kingdoms. The Blade Itself has all that, but it’s seen through a more hard-edged filter to create a High Fantasy tale that puts pace and character above the evocation of a landscape or the intricacies of a fictional history lesson. A darker, bloodier fantasy then, though not a Dark Fantasy such as Tim Lebbon’s Dusk, but rather a book that delivers a slew of familiar elements in a punchier package.

And it’s that pacing and balance that really impressed me, especially when one considers this is Abercrombie’s first novel. The Blade Itself doesn’t read like a first novel, but rather something conceived and polished by a pro, perhaps someone who’s been writing thrillers for years that decided to try their hand at fantasy. For anyone daunted by the average bloated fantasy novel of today, who maybe doesn’t feel like learning a whole new lexicon and geography every time they pick up a book, The Blade Itself delivers all of the essentials of the epic with none of the usual tedium. Abercrombie handles his alternating points of view over a large cast of distinctive characters superbly, parceling information out carefully and without repetition, keeping his prose lean and his focus tight. An example that struck me in particular of this balance was the description of the city of Adua, a central location in the story. We know quite a bit about it by following the exploits of Jezal dan Luthar, an aristocratic officer in the King’s Army, but it isn’t until Logen arrives in the city that we really see it through his outsider’s eyes. While many authors could probably not resist painting a word picture of their great city much earlier in the book, Abercrombie both preserves the narrative drive of his story and reinforces the effectiveness of Logen’s scenes as he discovers such an unfamiliar urban environment by saving his thunder for when he most needs it. That’s good judgment, and smart storytelling, and an example of why this book fits together so well.

Characters are really the heart of the story of The Blade Itself, and Abercrombie has done a fine job combining the needs of believability, reader empathy, and dramatic potential with his varied cast. The aforementioned Logen and Jezal share the most time with a third key character, the crippled Inquistor Glokta, a man at once sinister and sympathetic. Most of the meat of the story is conveyed in their three viewpoints, as Logen escapes the chaos of the northlands and links up with the powerful wizard Bayaz, Jezal trains for an important fencing contest but also cannot help but be aware of the politically important events in Adua, and Glokta, also in Adua, ferrets out criminals and conspiracies and himself in drawn into a larger conflict. As expected, the many story threads are gradually tightened together and the over-arching plot revealed piece by piece. War is coming, Logen’s old patron has become King of the North and launched an invasion southward, the emissaries of a mysterious prophet pursue our heroes, and machinations at the highest level of government may in fact be more than just power politics at its worst . . . The Blade Itself has enough intrigue, mystery, and violent conflict to keep you turning the page.

And violence is at the heart of The Blade Itself, but it is violence with consequences. The fight scenes are superb and grounded, and the injuries sustained by the characters don’t just disappear after a few pages. Many of the characters are marked by violence, such as Glokta, the victim of permanently disfiguring torture that has destroyed his former life and poisoned his soul, or Logen himself — called Ninefingers because of a missing digit, but also ‘The Bloody-Nine’ for his murderous propensities — a man who has been an instrument of violence all his life who is just now learning to regret what it has made him. The violence can be sensational and stirring, as it should be in an action fantasy story, but it is never sentimental and doesn’t shy from certain brutal truths, and that is perhaps the real difference between this story and many of the more mainstream fantasy epics.

The Blade Itself has a lot in common with Sword & Sorcery, and at heart it’s a High Fantasy with a hardboiled, Sword & Sorcery attitude. The pace, the command of voice and dialog, and the strong characterization all make this a series to watch. Like most first books in a trilogy (of which I have been reviewing a great many, lately) by the end of The Blade Itself our heroes have come together and the stage is set for the movement into the larger, overarching conflict. But long before that, about halfway through The Blade Itself, I put the book down, fired up the computer, and ordered its sequel Before They Are Hanged, because it was clear that this was a story going places, and an author to watch. If the rest of The First Law trilogy lives up to the promise of The Blade Itself, then fantasy fans who give Abercrombie a shot are in for some bloody good fun.

• The Blade Itself at Amazon
• My review of Before They Are Hanged
• My Review of Last Argument of Kings
  
• Joe Abercrombie’s website

Burning air or rivers running upstream would be the least terrible things. Last time, the Mages had practiced out of greed and lust for power. This time, were they to harness the magic, theirs would be a triumphant return from exile. If their armies were dead and gone to dust, they would make new ones. If their soldiers could not run fast enough, they would build machines. This time, revenge would be their prime motive.

• Title: Dusk
• Author: Tim Lebbon
• Genre: Dark Fantasy
• Year: 2006

Farm boy Rafe Baburn is the chosen one, destined to return magic to the land. Together with a group of varied companions, Rafe travels the strange landscape of Noreela, battling horrible monsters and evil magic…

Whoa! Wait a minute, I hear you say, what the hell is this crap? Chosen ones? Farm boys on a quest? Hasn’t this stuff been done to death? Yes, it has, but not like in Dusk. Trust me, and trust Tim Lebbon, and read on.

For starters, Noreela — the world of Dusk and its sequels — is a wretched place, a place sick and in decline following the ravages of the Cataclysmic War. In that war, some two hundred years prior to the events in the book, the Mages of Noreela were driven from the land — and with them its magic. Now the land festers, the earth itself rots away and strange creatures roam the landscape, the shells of vast, dead machines rot and rust away in the wilderness, and human society has grown savage and decadent. It is a post-apocalyptic fantasy world, and horror writer Lebbon doesn’t miss a trick in describing this land gone bad. Dusk is gritty, full of violence and ugliness and suffering, a true Dark Fantasy.

And Lebbon understands high fantasy cliches as well, and skillfully uses a reader’s expectations to create surprise in Dusk. Surface appearances here are deceiving, and the ‘farm boy is the chosen one on a quest’ narrative is beautifully (and shockingly) subverted by the books end. That’s not to say this is a deconstructionist or satirical look at the genre either, far from it, rather Dusk is every bit a work of high fantasy, only with a dark and original slant.

The book opens with the slaughter of Rafe’s village at the hands of a Red Monk, one of an order of implacable killers bent on the eradication of magic. Rafe escapes, as does the thief Kosar (who’s hands have been marked by perpetually bleeding wounds), and much of the action of the book involves them and a few other disparate companions, such as the drug addicted fledge miner Trey Barossa and the maternally protective and paranoid witch Hope, drawing together. It’s the standard quest formula, but it’s paced so well and sprinkled with unexpected details that even a jaded reader will not mind. Eventually it is revealed that two factions seek Rafe, the Red Monks and the returning Mages, and his group of protectors flee across the dying world in search of a refuge.

Dusk is the opening of something larger, essentially it’s an extended chase covering the gathering of our group of protagonists and the setting up of the conflict in Lebbon’s series. It’s a promising start, with a well-drawn world and interesting characters, and one that gets extra points from this reviewer for actually managing to surprise me. Perhaps my favorite aspect of Noreela is the way magic is handled for, even though it is gone from the land, there is much that the reader would consider magic that operates in the world. But it isn’t true magic, we learn, only simple exploits of natural laws, and when we finally witness real magic is strange, mysterious, and awesome. All too often fantasy fiction is safe, and magic is little more than a fireworks display or a card trick slowed down so you can see how it’s done. In Dusk, magic is weird, its frightening, and one can sense its power — something so rare in most contemporary fantasy that its bears singling out for praise.

Dusk is something different for the jaded palate, and if the remainder of the series lives up to the first volume, Lebbon may yet produce a classic saga for fans of true Dark Fantasy.

• Dusk at Amazon
• Tim Lebbon’s website