A full-bodied cast and enjoyably dense plot elevate this fantasy tale.
In Nullius’ fantasy debut, a woman reclaims her memories spanning a millennium of warring humans, sorcerers, and immortals.
In Golem, an isolated colony “booming with technology,” Lyaphend Farwalth meets up with the Prime Dictator’s daughter, Wave Haizer. She happens to possess an object Lyaphend wants—one that, with a mere touch, will open up Lyaphend’s mind to a past she’s forgotten. Evidently, more than a thousand years ago she was Enlenea, one of the “tainted” humans turned immortal by a mysterious energy. She belonged to the Elegies, a select few of the tainted that some humans worshiped as gods. While the tainted can be killed, they’re eventually “revived” in objects or living people; Lyaphend won’t truly know who or what she is until all of her memories have returned. As the story progresses and time passes, readers encounter a varied cast, including the red-eyed, sorcery-practicing Halians and other individuals often at odds with one another. The novel feels like a series of subplots; along with the story of the Elegies, there are narrative threads following the Reverentia group, determined to find the origin of the tainted’s power, and Argen, a young man from a “land far away” who travels to Golem. It makes for an unpredictable tale, as characters will suddenly resurface in later stories despite numerous years having passed. A standout among the vibrant cast is Regnal, an Elegy with no form of his own who “imitates things of his interest,” such as an avian creature. The prose shines, as when an Elegy utters, “Your flavoured animosity bitters my resolve,” or when Argen wipes “the cold sweat from his brow, cleansing his memories of a dream’s unrelenting musk.” All of this culminates in a smashing ending—one that the author can let linger or pick up at another time for a sequel.
A full-bodied cast and enjoyably dense plot elevate this fantasy tale. (glossary)Pub Date: Dec. 30, 2023
ISBN: 9798218271510
Page Count: 281
Publisher: Self
Review Posted Online: Nov. 15, 2023
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
BOOK REVIEW
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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