Book Review | The Hunter's Kind by Rebecca Levene

Born in tragedy and raised in poverty, Krishanjit never aspired to be anything greater than what he was: a humble goatherd, tending his flock on the slopes of his isolated mountain home. But Krish has learned that he's the son of the king of Ashanesland—and the moon god reborn. Now, with the aid of his allies, Krish is determined to fight his murderous father and seize control of Ashanesland. But Dae Hyo, Eric and Olufemi are dangerously unreliable and hiding secrets of their own.

To take Ashanesland, Krish must travel to the forbidden Mirror Town and unlock the secrets of its powerful magic. But the price of his victory may be much greater than the consequences of his defeat, for deep in the distant Moon Forest lives a girl called Cwen—a disciple of the god known only as the Hunter—who believes that Krish represents all that is evil in the world.

And she has made it her life's mission to seek Krish and destroy all who fight by his side.

***

Between City of Stairs, The Goblin Emperor, Words of Radiance, the latest Daniel Abraham and the debut of Brian Staveley, 2014 saw the release of a feast of remarkable fantasies—and whilst I find that playing favourites is a fool's game usually, last year, there was one I loved above all others. The only complaint I found myself able to make about Smiler's Fair was that there wasn't more of it, but with second volume of The Hollow Gods upon us, there is now—and how!

At the heart of Rebecca Levene's first fantasy was the titular travelling carnival: a cultural crossroads whose various visitors were invited, for a prince, to indulge in their unsightly vices. There, they gambled and they drank; there, they fought and they fucked. For centuries, Smiler's Fair was a welcome outlet for wicked impulses, as well as those desires disdained by the lords of the Lands of the Sun and Moon, in a place apart from the populace.

That was before it burned; before it was ravaged by a magical fire that left thousands dead and many more homeless. But it's "best not to cry about what's past. It's only what's coming that matters." (p.39) And what's that, you ask? In a word: war.

Before that sorry state of affairs is declared, The Hunter's Kind has us spend some time with a few new faces, including Cwen. The first hawk among the Hunter's hundreds—an orphan army whose mandate is to defend the people of the sun against the monsters of the moon—Cwen must put aside her principles and lead her lot into conflict when she learns that Yron, her god's eternal enemy, has been reborn.

Book Review | Wolves by Simon Ings

At school, Mick and Connie cooked up all the ways the world could end.

Years later, Michel imagines apocalypses for a living, and lives inside fantasies of the Fall. Conrad works in advertising, spinning aspirational dreams out of imaginary light.

Will their reunion reveal who killed Conrad’s mother?

Will it make them a lot of money? Or, just maybe, bring about the collapse of Western civilization?

A surreal whodunnit about what happens when unhappy men get their hands on powerful media, Wolves is an informed, atmospheric, cutting-edge tale of the near future.

***

Wolves has been hailed as Simon Ing's "spectacular return to SF," and it is that, I think—though the text's spare speculative elements only come into focus in advance of the finale, when the augmented reality Conrad's company conceives of matures into something more meaningful than an idea.

The rest is something else: a catastrophic coming of age tale complicated by a macabre mystery which reminded me of This River Awakens. At the book's beating heart, however, is the frustrated friendship between Conrad and his schoolmate Michel:

Michel was quiet, lugubrious, self-contained. For me, at any rate, he had extraordinary presence. A glamour. If he understood my feelings for him, he never let on. He showed very little tenderness for me. He wasn't interested in my weaknesses. He wanted me to be strong. He cared for me as you would care for your side-kick, your familiar, for the man you had chosen to watch your back. He said we had to toughen up. (p.31)

For what? Why, for The Fall, folks!

"The End Times were on their way. [Michel] was convinced of this." (p.98) Conrad isn't so sure, but he plays along with his hero's apocalypse prep—both to be with him and to escape the hell of his own home, an Overlook-esque hotel with an equally unsettling clientele: war veterans who were blind before our central character's father equipped them with special sensory vests.

All of which comes into play in a major way later, but at the beginning of the book, it's background. At the foreground of this phase of the fiction is Conrad's manic mother: a woman who habitually abandons her family in favour of "a protest camp that had grown up around a nearby military airbase." (p.51) She has to be rescued from this retreat repeatedly—a pattern rudely interrupted one summer when Conrad discovers her dead body in the boot of his father's car.