A panoramic, detail-driven historical fantasy that delivers plenty of heroes to root for.
This fantasy debut features a team that hunts monsters from parallel realms during World War I.
It is 1914, and the well-dressed Countess Mathilde von Covey is attending a meeting of “seditious Bosnian Serbs” in Sarajevo’s Kafe Zemljak. There, she encounters the diminutive Gavrilo Princip. He intends to make his mark on history, and, after falling under Covey’s strange spell, he hears her say, “Be the change you want to see in the world.” Princip goes on to assassinate Archduke Franz Ferdinand of Austria, which instigates the Great War. Covey isn’t merely alluring, she’s possessed by the Dream Whisperer, an interdimensional being capable of manipulating human hosts, dreams, and global events. The creature’s true goal is to awaken the Sleepers, unearthly beasts that will act in concert as gate openers, ultimately allowing the Outer Gods to return and breed chaos. A handful of talented individuals have committed to stopping Covey, including Cmdr. Fleming of the British Secret Service; Mycroft Holmes, brother of the famous detective Sherlock Holmes; and Dr. Rebecca Mumm of the Museum of Natural History in Paris. When Covey succeeds in waking two Sleepers, Fleming helps destroy them. The heroes then use a rare travel guide by esoteric scholar Friedrich von Junzt to locate temples in Borneo, Bolivia, and elsewhere that house dormant Sleepers. To protect against interlopers, Covey keeps her manservant, the hulking Moloch, nearby. Yet should anything happen to the Dream Whisperer’s current body, he can always jump to another.
Draym’s series opener is a deep crawl through the historical trenches, the first half of which covers the years 1914 to 1917 before jumping to 1921. Much like Kim Newman’s Anno Dracula novels, this adventure peppers keen-eyed readers with references to everything from Jack the Ripper to 1908’s Tunguska event. Mycroft is a wonderful presence who at one point explains that Arthur Conan Doyle invented the nonexistent Watson to “offset my brother’s brilliance.” Throughout the book, whenever Draym sets a scene, readers are treated to a colossal amount of historical background. Realistic portraits of battlefields like Ypres make the ensuing supernatural moments that much more exciting. The author shows the same impressive flair for bringing believable science to the narrative. After studying a Sleeper’s corpse, Mumm says: “The cell walls are exceptionally rigid,” as in fungi, and yet “one would expect polysaccharides in there as long-chain polymers like chitin.” Readers also get the pulpy descriptions that help any genre piece sing (“A viscous, fluorescent, green liquid was dripping from one of seven eye-sockets”). Truly unexpected is Fleming’s elf lineage. His grandmother wishes for him to join the elves as they slip from Earth—via breaches in reality—because of humanity’s destructive “perpetual economic growth.” Mumm is also gracefully realized as someone who prefers the beauty of nature to that of a church. When the Dream Whisperer does initiate the novel’s most predictable twist, it’s nevertheless thrillingly executed. Draym makes the right choice to skip 1918 and the influenza years. This allows the story to halt in 1921, with the promise of darker horrors, both real and H.P. Lovecraft–inspired, to come.
A panoramic, detail-driven historical fantasy that delivers plenty of heroes to root for.Pub Date: March 29, 2020
ISBN: 979-8-63-158374-0
Page Count: 567
Publisher: Self
Review Posted Online: March 28, 2020
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 1, 2020
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
PROFILES
An author to watch, Buehlman is now two for two in delivering eerie, offbeat novels with admirable literary skill.
Cormac McCarthy's The Road meets Chaucer's Canterbury Tales in this frightful medieval epic about an orphan girl with visionary powers in plague-devastated France.
The year is 1348. The conflict between France and England is nothing compared to the all-out war building between good angels and fallen ones for control of heaven (though a scene in which soldiers are massacred by a rainbow of arrows is pretty horrific). Among mortals, only the girl, Delphine, knows of the cataclysm to come. Angels speak to her, issuing warnings—and a command to run. A pack of thieves is about to carry her off and rape her when she is saved by a disgraced knight, Thomas, with whom she teams on a march across the parched landscape. Survivors desperate for food have made donkey a delicacy and don't mind eating human flesh. The few healthy people left lock themselves in, not wanting to risk contact with strangers, no matter how dire the strangers' needs. To venture out at night is suicidal: Horrific forces swirl about, ravaging living forms. Lethal black clouds, tentacled water creatures and assorted monsters are comfortable in the daylight hours as well. The knight and a third fellow journeyer, a priest, have difficulty believing Delphine's visions are real, but with oblivion lurking in every shadow, they don't have any choice but to trust her. The question becomes, can she trust herself? Buehlman, who drew upon his love of Fitzgerald and Hemingway in his acclaimed Southern horror novel, Those Across the River (2011), slips effortlessly into a different kind of literary sensibility, one that doesn't scrimp on earthy humor and lyrical writing in the face of unspeakable horrors. The power of suggestion is the author's strong suit, along with first-rate storytelling talent.
An author to watch, Buehlman is now two for two in delivering eerie, offbeat novels with admirable literary skill.Pub Date: Oct. 2, 2012
ISBN: 978-1-937007-86-7
Page Count: 432
Publisher: Ace/Berkley
Review Posted Online: Sept. 1, 2012
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 15, 2012
Although the melodrama sometimes is a bit much, the superb worldbuilding and intricate plotline make this a must-read.
Using mystery and romance elements in a nonlinear narrative, SenLinYu’s debut is a doorstopper of a fantasy that follows a woman with missing memories as she navigates through a war-torn realm in search of herself.
Helena Marino is a talented young healer living in Paladia—the “Shining City”—who has been thrust into a brutal war against an all-powerful necromancer and his army of Undying, loyal henchmen with immortal bodies, and necrothralls, reanimated automatons. When Helena is awakened from stasis, a prisoner of the necromancer’s forces, she has no idea how long she has been incarcerated—or the status of the war. She soon finds herself a personal prisoner of Kaine Ferron, the High Necromancer’s “monster” psychopath who has sadistically killed hundreds for his master. Ordered to recover Helena’s buried memories by any means necessary, the two polar opposites—Helena and Kaine, healer and killer—end up discovering much more as they begin to understand each other through shared trauma. While necromancy is an oft-trod subject in fantasy novels, the author gives it a fresh feel—in large part because of their superb worldbuilding coupled with unforgettable imagery throughout: “[The necromancer] lay reclined upon a throne of bodies. Necrothralls, contorted and twisted together, their limbs transmuted and fused into a chair, moving in synchrony, rising and falling as they breathed in tandem, squeezing and releasing around him…[He] extended his decrepit right hand, overlarge with fingers jointed like spider legs.” Another noteworthy element is the complex dynamic between Helena and Kaine. To say that these two characters shared the gamut of intense emotions would be a vast understatement. Readers will come for the fantasy and stay for the romance.
Although the melodrama sometimes is a bit much, the superb worldbuilding and intricate plotline make this a must-read.Pub Date: Sept. 23, 2025
ISBN: 9780593972700
Page Count: 1040
Publisher: Del Rey
Review Posted Online: July 17, 2025
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 15, 2025
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