I’ve recently devoured Christopher Buehlman’s oeuvre, and I hereby enthusiastically recommend all six of his novels. Here’s a quick rundown of the first five.
“Those Across the River” is about some bad things across a river. This book makes emphatically the case that if your town ritualistically sends a pig into the woods, it’s best that the ritual continues.
“Between Two Fires” is about a girl on a mission to save the world and the disgraced knight that accompanies her. The Black Plague is ravaging France. Also ravaging France are demons. On their travels they have a series of horrific encounters. Classic horror travelogue thing going on here.
“The Necromancer’s House” is about a recovering alcoholic who is also a wizard and has an extremely cool house. His once-dead dog lives on inside a body composed of wicker and a Dali painting. He has a relationship with a murderous mermaid, and one of the mermaid’s victims has a connection to a fearsome witch. This fearsome witch wants the wizard dead, and now she knows where he is. This book is funny and scary, the magic is incredibly fun, and the climactic action is spellbinding.
“The Lesser Dead” is about some vampires that live in the subway tunnels under New York City. They’ll drink your blood, sure, but they aren’t particularly murderous. But then they meet some vampires that look like children and are very murderous. Lots of people and vampires die.
“The Suicide Motor Club” opens with a chilling chapter in which a child is plucked from a moving vehicle by vampires. The vampires are expert drivers, and this is how they like to hunt. The good-driving vampires cause the stolen child’s parents to wreck. Mom decides to become a nun. So, yes, the reader is treated to a vampire-hunting nun. This novel shares a world with “The Lesser Dead,” but it isn’t a sequel. It is extremely violent, horrific stuff.
“The Blacktongue Thief” is his most recent novel and the first to be labeled “fantasy” rather than “horror.” You still might get a little spooked. There are, after all, goblins, a kraken, assassins, witches and giants among the treats in store. It’s a first-person tale told by a funny narrator named Kinch. He has a black tongue, and he is a thief which is were the title comes from, I assume. Kinch went to thief school to be a thief, and is now in tremendous debt to the thieves’ guild. While much worse consequences are in store, he currently sports a tattoo that only shows up in firelight and that entitles anyone who slaps him in the face to a free drink. The guild orders him to accompany a gifted warrior on her quest for reasons they won’t tell him. He’d previously attempted and failed to rob this warrior (in part because of the massive bird that, when not beaking the heck out of people, lives in a tattoo on her torso) and she had spared his life. There is plenty of magic not held in tattoos, but the tattoo magic is fascinating, and not just because I want a clock on my chest that allows me to turn back time. It’s also because I want marks on my eyelids that allow me to see both lies and in the dark. Wouldn’t mind the one that lets me breathe underwater either. Suffice it to say, you can totally understand why the assassin that follows Kinch has her body totally covered in tattoos.
The worldbuilding is awesome. While the story is focused and fast-paced, enough tidbits about the world are parceled out to make it feel like the author not only knows everything about the world be built, he also loves it. You’ll learn just enough about the goblin wars (there is practically a generation of people missing, so bloody were the battles, and goblins gave horses a disease that has made them effectively extinct) that you’ll be worried and pretty sure there will be another one. The novel has a satisfying ending, though no doubt there is more to be told. I wasn’t aware until after finishing the book that it is the first in a trilogy, and while I long ago vowed to no longer read a book in a series until the series was complete, I’m glad I accidentally made an exception for this one.
10/10 — would read again when book 2 comes out
