As the city rebuilds from the onslaught of sorcery that nearly destroyed it, the great Houses of Paris, ruled by Fallen angels, still contest one another for control over the capital.
House Silverspires was once the most powerful, but just as it sought to rise again, an ancient evil brought it low. Phillippe, an immortal who escaped the carnage, has a singular goal—to resurrect someone he lost. But the cost of such magic might be more than he can bear.
In House Hawthorn, Madeleine the alchemist has had her addiction to angel essence savagely broken. Struggling to live on, she is forced on a perilous diplomatic mission to the underwater dragon kingdom—and finds herself in the midst of intrigues that have already caused one previous emissary to mysteriously disappear....
As the Houses seek a peace more devastating than war, those caught between new fears and old hatreds must find strength—or fall prey to a magic that seeks to bind all to its will.
***
The second Dominion of the Fallen novel sees Aliette de Bodard return to the city of down-on-their-luck divinities she depicted so delicately in The House of Shattered Wings in the company of a cast of characters that were in the background of book one. In that sense it's a sequel, however The House of Binding Thorns stands as a striking example of a story that both stands alone and expands.
Welcome, then—or welcome back, perhaps—to the capital of France after the collapse. Some sixty years on from "the cataclysm that had devastated Paris, reducing monuments to blackened rubble, turning the Seine dark with the dangerous residues of spells, and leaving booby traps that still hadn't vanished," the angels who fell from heaven on that dark day have organised themselves into powerful houses, very much in the mode of the mafia. Indeed, de Bodard doubles down on that extended metaphor in The House of Binding Thorns, in that its narrative is driven by drug trafficking and an addict on the road to recovery is its principle perspective.
But the drug doing the damage in postwar Paris is no conventional concoction of chemicals. It is, instead, angel essence: the magic-amplifying fibre of the Fallen. It is "the promise of pleasure, of power," and power is what every mob boss wants, what every mob boss will do anything to get...
Asmodeus is just such a soul, as the head of House Hawthorn: a "brash statement of power" beside the "genteel, quiet, decaying thing" that is House Silverspires. "Silverspires had been Hawthorn's enemy," had kept it in check, "but the events of seven months ago"—so cannily chronicled in The House of Shattered Wings—"had left them bloodless and in ruins, barely capable of being a power in postwar Paris, much less a threat."
With Hawthorn high on its triumph, every other House is battening down the hatches. But though the ex-angel Asmodeus' organisation appears unequaled, in reality, it too is a ruin. "The House might look grand and magnificent, but it was like the rest of the city: barely hanging on to normality, struggling to maintain itself against decay." Mold and char and rot are rife in the Dominion of the Fallen novels, giving the series a certain sickening stench, as of something spoiled. That said, there are also heady hints of what was: a beautiful world, all orange blossom and eau de bergamot.
And as above, so below. Literally, in this instance, for under the River Seine, another kingdom cometh. "Legends had come to life in this city, in this place. Tales that had always been distant dreams," of angels, magic—and now dragons, or rather Rong.
Welcome, then—or welcome back, perhaps—to the capital of France after the collapse. Some sixty years on from "the cataclysm that had devastated Paris, reducing monuments to blackened rubble, turning the Seine dark with the dangerous residues of spells, and leaving booby traps that still hadn't vanished," the angels who fell from heaven on that dark day have organised themselves into powerful houses, very much in the mode of the mafia. Indeed, de Bodard doubles down on that extended metaphor in The House of Binding Thorns, in that its narrative is driven by drug trafficking and an addict on the road to recovery is its principle perspective.
But the drug doing the damage in postwar Paris is no conventional concoction of chemicals. It is, instead, angel essence: the magic-amplifying fibre of the Fallen. It is "the promise of pleasure, of power," and power is what every mob boss wants, what every mob boss will do anything to get...
Asmodeus is just such a soul, as the head of House Hawthorn: a "brash statement of power" beside the "genteel, quiet, decaying thing" that is House Silverspires. "Silverspires had been Hawthorn's enemy," had kept it in check, "but the events of seven months ago"—so cannily chronicled in The House of Shattered Wings—"had left them bloodless and in ruins, barely capable of being a power in postwar Paris, much less a threat."
With Hawthorn high on its triumph, every other House is battening down the hatches. But though the ex-angel Asmodeus' organisation appears unequaled, in reality, it too is a ruin. "The House might look grand and magnificent, but it was like the rest of the city: barely hanging on to normality, struggling to maintain itself against decay." Mold and char and rot are rife in the Dominion of the Fallen novels, giving the series a certain sickening stench, as of something spoiled. That said, there are also heady hints of what was: a beautiful world, all orange blossom and eau de bergamot.
And as above, so below. Literally, in this instance, for under the River Seine, another kingdom cometh. "Legends had come to life in this city, in this place. Tales that had always been distant dreams," of angels, magic—and now dragons, or rather Rong.