Battle of the Books, Summer 2012, First Round :: Destroyer of Worlds by Mark Chadbourn vs. Silver by Rhiannon Held

This battle in the Summer 2012 Battle of the Books features Destroyer of Worlds by Mark Chadbourn going against Silver by Rhiannon Held. The winner will be whichever book I most want to keep reading after the first 25 pages.

Destroyer of Worlds: Pyr Books trade paperback, May 2012, 382 pages, cover illustration by John Picacio, book three of Kingdom of the Serpent. Destroyer of Worlds was originally published in 2009 in the UK by Gollancz. This series is connected to Chadbourn's prior trilogies, The Age of Misrule and The Dark Age. Aaron sampled the first book of the Kingdom of the Serpent series, Jack of Ravens, in the Winter Battle of the Books, and the second book, The Burning Man, was in the Spring Battle of the Books. Mark Chadbourn is a UK writer of about seventeen novels. He has won two British Fantasy Awards for short fiction, and a handful of his novels have been British Fantasy Awards nominees.

Destroyer of Worlds commences with an eight page long summary of what has happened before. Good thing, because I haven’t read any of the books in this sequence of trilogies. From this recap I took, basically, that the Brothers and Sisters of Dragons have fought battles throughout the ages, back and forth through time, with and against various Gods, and they are brought back to life after death. I decided to call this section background information. For the first 25 pages I read the prologue and a small portion of chapter one.

The war to end all wars is coming, the battle against the Void. In Asgard, home of the Norse Gods, an army of terrible creatures is invading. Hunter, Brother of Dragons, advises the Aesir to run. Many Aesir die in battle before they are forced to abandon Asgard. Elsewhere in the Otherworld called the Far Lands, Mallory and Caitlin, Brother and Sister of Dragons, are in a great walled city under siege by Riot-Beasts. Young Virginia Dare, from the original Roanoke colony, promises to show Mallory a secret way into the Fortress of the Void.

Riding on the supernatural Last Train are five Brothers and Sisters of Dragons. Church, the Champion of Existence, talks with Veitch, who was previously a villain. Nature spirit Laura, seer Shavi and Ruth chat in another carriage.

Silver: Tor book trade paperback, June 2012, 317 pages, cover photograph by Trevillion Images. Rhiannon Held is a US writer. Silver, an urban fantasy, is her first novel, and start of a planned series. The first 25 pages is conveniently exactly three chapters.

Werewolf Andrew Dare tracks, in both human and wolf form, an unknown lone werewolf in New Hampshire. The lone werewolf smells of silver and pain. When Andrew finds her she’s in human form, and she’s scrawny and acting crazy. She can’t change, her “wild self” is gone. She claims Death calls her Silver.

Andrew decides against driving Silver far in his car. He checks them into a hotel and phones the Boston sub-alpha, and tells him that he found the lone and she’s more than he bargained for. When Andrew returns with some fast-food, Silver unsuccessfully tries to escape the hotel room. She argues that “the monster” is coming. Later, when Silver is resting again, Andrew looks at Silver’s hurt arm and sees an odd series of red welts. Andrew phones his Roanoke pack alpha, tells him that he found her, and it appears that someone injected her, a werewolf, with a liquid form of silver.

The Battle: We have a contemporary urban fantasy going against a world-spanning, epic fantasy which is the third book in trilogy. Werewolves seem to be in danger in Silver. The universe seems in danger in Destroyer of Worlds. Strangely, both books mention the lost English colony of Roanoke and contain characters with the last name of Dare.

Destroyer of Worlds starts with a dire situation, an eminent universal final battle. There are a host of characters with awesomely complicated pasts. Unfortunately, the characters I met in the first 25 pages of this book didn’t succeed in drawing me emotionally into the story. Maybe I couldn’t quite relate to their situations. Destroyer of Worlds suffers because it’s difficult to jump into a story in progress. Undoubtedly, this book would’ve worked much better for me if I had read the previous books.

Silver, on the other hand, is a more personal story. It’s set on a smaller stage. The idea of werewolves using silver as a weapon against other werewolves is different. I like that Andrew tries to minimize questionable appearances to avoid getting attention. Silver’s worship of The Lady, the moon, and her speaking with Death, who follows her, is interesting.

Someday I’d like to read more by Mark Chadbourn, but preferably something that begins a story, not ends one. So for this battle, I choose to go with werewolves.

THE WINNER: SILVER by Rhiannon Held

Silver will advance to meet Age of Aztec by James Lovegrove in the second round.

To see the whole bracket, click here.

Battle of the Books, Spring 2012, First Round :: The Flame Alphabet by Ben Marcus vs. The Burning Man by Mark Chadbourn

Moving into the bottom half of the bracket, the Spring 2012 Battle of the Books continues with The Flame Alphabet by Ben Marcus against The Burning Man by Mark Chadbourn. The winner will be whichever book I most want to keep reading after the first 25 pages.

The Flame Alphabet: Alfred A. Knopf hardcover, January 2012, 289 pages, cover design by Peter Mendelsund. Ben Marcus is a highly regarded mainstream author. His three previous books, Notable American Women, The Father Costume, and The Age of Wire and String, have included elements of surrealism, but The Flame Alphabet is his first outright science fiction or fantasy novel (even if you won't find it in the science fiction section of the bookshop).

The Flame Alphabet is set in a near-future society that is quickly breaking down due to a strange epidemic that has made children's speech toxic to their parents. The book opens with our narrator Sam and his wife Claire making the terrible choice to abandon their teenaged daughter Esther to save themselves. The rest of the opening 25 pages consist of flashbacks to when they first fell ill, and their gradual realization that the source of the illness was their own daughter.

The Burning Man: Pyr trade paperback, April 2012, 390 pages, cover art by John Picacio. Mark Chadbourn is a British fantasist, who has published some 15 novels since 1992 and twice has won the British Fantasy Award. First published in England in 2006, The Burning Man is the second in the Kingdom of the Serpent trilogy, which is related to Chadbourn's prior trilogies, The Age of Misrule and The Dark Age. The Burning Man is the sequel to Jack of Ravens, which fell in the first round of the Winter 2012 Battle of the Books. No shame in that——it lost to Elizabeth Bear's Range of Ghosts, which went on to win the entire bracket.

(Spoilers to Jack of Ravens follow.) As summarized in a ten-page synopsis at the outset of the book, the protagonist of this series is Jack Churchill, who has appeared at various points in history as a "Brother of Dragons," battling evil forces led by his former friend Ryan Veitch. In the novel's prologue, Jack and some friends——including his wife Ruth, with whom he was reunited in the previous volume——collect some fellow Brothers and Sisters of Dragons, who had been lost without their memories in an alternate universe. Meanwhile, Ryan Veitch is resurrected after seemingly dying in the previous volume.

The Battle: The Flame Alphabet has a strong and original premise, even if there are some precedents: Octavia Butler's "Speech Sounds" also showed a society breaking down due to a failure of language, Chuck Palahniuk's Lullaby previously handled the concept of unwittingly harming the people around you with words. The initial scenes strike me as tedious at times, as Marcus persistently repeats himself, straining for an impressive-sounding effect. (I often have this reaction when mainstream writers try to do science fiction, although thankfully with some exceptions, such as Kazuo Ishiguro's Never Let Me Go.)

For me, the saving grace in The Flame Alphabet so far is the dialogue, which quickly reveals the personalities of Sam and Ruth and their acerbic daughter Esther, while also framing the metaphoric import of the story. In an early scene, Marcus introduces the theme of language as weaponry, when Sam shows Ruth a timeline for their getaway:

"You actually wrote this down," she finally said, her voice hollowed out through the mask.

A statement and not a question. Some essential marital weaponry from the arsenal of not giving an inch. Verbalize someone's actions back to them. Menace them with language, the language mirror. Death by feedback.

"It's a suggestion," I said, in the bedside voice I'd adopted as her caretaker.

* * *

Claire gave the timeline back to me and turned away.

"Unbelievable," she whispered. "I hope you're enjoying yourself."

"Oh, I am, Claire," I said. "The time of my life."

In his flashbacks, Sam analyzes how they could have reached the point of leaving Esther to fend for herself, when at the initial outbreak they had vowed "we would love our daughter no matter what. How ridiculous to think otherwise. Ridiculous. It was so easy to agree to what did not test us." The opening 25 pages end with a terrific passage of dialogue (too long to quote) between all three characters, displaying Ruth's sarcasm, which is amusingly witty but has a withering effect on her parents.

Turning to The Burning Man, usually it's a handicap to enter the Battle of the Books as a sequel, but this time I think it's oddly helpful. The opening of the previous volume, Jack of Ravens felt a bit aimless to me, while this book's initial prologue gives welcome context and a nicely dramatic feel from the opening lines:

My name is Jack Churchill, known to my friends as Church, and I am only a man. This is a story of gods, and powers higher than gods. I write these words in my head, and thus on a page, and thus throughout all Existence, as I stand here, at the end of the world.

From the first day that I accepted my role as a Brother of Dragons, I have struggled long and hard. At the time I didn't understand the full nature of the responsibility thrust upon my shoulders. Now I do.

That's solid epic fantasy fare. Still, I confess I am wearying of multi-volume fantasies about nice guys trying to preserve goodness and light against the forces of badness and dark. Reading of Jack and his companions racing through a building from a gazillion angry spiders (which he knew perfectly well would be there) feels to me like watching friends play a spirited role-playing game. It's all in good fun. There will be adventures and battles, characters killed (but some will come back after a saving throw), possibly a winner (probably not), but tonight's game will be not much different from last week's.

From the opening pages, it seems to me that Ben Marcus has something more interesting to say with The Flame Alphabet, and I'd like to see where he decides to take his novel's concept.

THE WINNER: THE FLAME ALPHABET by Ben Marcus

The Flame Alphabet moves on to the second round, to face either Everyone Loves a Good Train Wreck by Eric G. Wilson or The Stolen Bride by Tony Hays.

To see the whole bracket, click here.

Battle of the Books, Winter 2012, First Round :: Range of Ghosts by Elizabeth Bear vs. Jack of Ravens by Mark Chadbourn

Our penultimate first round match in the Winter 2012 Battle of the Books is between Range of Ghosts by Elizabeth Bear and Jack of Ravens by Mark Chadbourn. The book I most want to continue reading after 25 pages will advance to the second round.

Range of Ghosts: Tor hardcover, March 2012, 334 pages. Elizabeth Bear is still a fairly new author; her first novel Hammered appeared in 2005. But she is so prolific it feels like she is a veteran of the field -- she has published upwards of 20 books already. She was the Campbell Award winner for best new author in 2005, and she has twice won the Hugo Award for her short fiction. On the strength of that record, we named Range of Ghosts one of our four seeded books for the Winter 2012 Battle of the Books.

Range of Ghosts is the first in a new epic fantasy trilogy, drawing heavily on the history of the Mongol Empire. As the story begins, the Great Khagan has died, and his descendants have fought a bloody battle over succession (the kind of civil war that actually fractured the Mongol Empire). Our hero Temur, grandson of the Great Khagan and younger brother of one of the main contenders to the throne, has survived the battle only because he was so grievously wounded he was left for dead. He struggles to survive and to find his way into exile, even as his uncle seeks to hunt him down.

Jack of Ravens: Pyr trade paperback, March 2012, 414 pages, cover art by John Picacio. British fantasy author Mark Chadbourn is also prolific, having published some 15 novels since 1992, and he is a two-time winner of the British Fantasy Award. He has been successful in Britain for many years, but only recently came to the attention of American readers with Pyr Books' U.S. reprints of his backlist.

First published in England in 2006, Jack of Ravens is the first in the Kingdom of the Serpent trilogy, which is related to Chadbourn's prior trilogies, The Age of Misrule and The Dark Age. The protagonist is Jack Churchill, who on the very first page finds himself somehow transported to the remote past, and immediately doing battle with supernatural creatures.

The Battle: Sorry if I'm spoiling the suspense here, but Range of Ghosts just has a kick-ass opening. It is beautifully written, and the opening image of Temur waking up badly injured, among countless dead warriors scattered about the steppe, pulls us into the story from the outset. We sympathize with Temur as he struggles to survive the next days, then gradually begins to ponder what future he can still lead. Meanwhile, a quick glimpse of the mysterious sorcerer aiding his uncle -- he has just sacrificed two young girls for his blood magic, so we know this guy means business -- keeps the dramatic tension up.

The icing on the cake is a gorgeous piece of supernatural imagery, as Temur watches the moons rise:

He tried not to count the moons as they rose but could not help himself. No bigger than Temur's smallest fingernail, each floated up the night like a reflection on dark water. One, two. A dozen. Fifteen. Thirty. Thirty-one. A scatter of hammered sequins in the veil the Eternal Sky drew across himself to become Mother Night.

Among them, no matter how he strained his eyes, he did not find the moon he most wished to see--the Roan Moon of his elder brother Qulan, with its dappled pattern of steel and silver.
* * *
Before the death of Mongke Khagan, there had been over a hundred moons. One for Mongke Khagan himself and one for each son and each grandson of his loins, and every living son and grandson and great-grandson of the Great Khagan Temusan as well--at least those born while the Great Khagan lived and reigned.

Every night since the war began, Temur had meant to keep himself from counting. And every night since, he had failed, and there had been fewer moons than the night before.

The bar was thus set very high for Jack of Ravens, and Chadbourn didn't clear it for me. There's nothing wrong with the opening of this book, just not quite enough right to compete with Range of Ghosts. The opening scene has our hero Jack battling a giant (pun intended by Chadbourn), and it would be a pretty good fight scene, except it's happening before we know the first thing about who (or where or when) this protagonist is, so we don't much understand why we should care.

Soon after, we realize that Jack has been thrown 2,000 years into the past, but there is a maddening vagueness to the narrative. We learn he doesn't remember very much, but Chadbourn doesn't stop to tell us clearly just what he does remember. Is he even from our time? As far as I know, he could be from the year 1900 or 2100. Really all we know of him is that he (conveniently) is a scholar of British history. I have no sense so far of his personality. He wants to get back to the present(?) because he's in love with some woman he can barely remember, but so far it doesn't mean much to me whether he succeeds. Perhaps I would gradually come to care about this fellow's plight, but the Battle of the Books format is unforgiving of "gradually."

THE WINNER: RANGE OF GHOSTS by Elizabeth Bear

Range of Ghosts advances to the second round, to take on either The Darkening Dream by Andy Gavin or The Pillars of Hercules by David Constantine.

To see the whole bracket, click here.