An entertaining pistol-and-sorcery fantasia set in a mesmerizing underworld.
A renegade Union soldier breeches Hell to save a little girl in Ferguson’s sprawling fantasy novel.
In late 1864, the drunk and depressed Col. Erich Von Beck deserts Sherman’s Union Army ranks as they march through Georgia after killing his only friend, Sgt. Valentine Schmidt, in a drunken accident. He washes up at the farm of a fetching widow named Jenny Mabry, where his suicidal despondency lifts as he takes to Jenny’s bed and bonds with her 8-year-old daughter, Beatrice. When Bea is possessed by a devil, an itinerant monk convinces Von Beck to descend to Hell to retrieve her soul. A magic ritual duly deposits Von Beck in an underworld teeming with devils, demons, witches, ghosts, hellhounds, fauns, centaurs, imps, and a working class of damned human souls. The place is full of horrors (“One soul carried his own intestines piled in his arms. A leering devil decapitated another; the torso chased its own rolling head, picked it up, placed it back on its shoulders”), but also contains surprising amenities, including bustling towns, taverns serving great beer, and dragon-driven railroads and airships. Von Beck is joined on his quest to rescue Bea’s soul by succubus sisters Mezyss and Meänia and the shade of Valentine, now a font of occult lore; their travels through Hell’s nine circles get them into countless bloody fights with monsters and introduce them to mythical potentates like Lilith and the horse-fly devil Beelzebub. Also searching for Bea is the devil Marchosias and his master, the Magus, who wants to appropriate Bea’s innocent soul-power to seize Hell’s throne. As he becomes embroiled in various plots and power-plays, Von Beck slowly cottons to his identity as the legendary warrior Arturus, Guardian of Fate and Warlord of the Damned, who plays a central role in prophecies.
This first book in Ferguson’s Hellfire Saga series feels like a mashup of Cold Mountain, The Exorcist, and a steampunk rendering of Dante’s Inferno; its strands don’t always mesh well. Von Beck starts out as the antihero in a Civil War novel written in gritty, evocative prose: “Summoning strength, he pulled deeply from the brown rotgut in his canteen and scrambled into his uniform. Then he trotted Trudy through the camp, saber raised as he rousted his exhausted men from their salt pork and chicory and back into column.” But in Hell, Von Beck’s character is overshadowed by the bewildering spectacle swirling around him as he struggles to get his bearings amid the underworld’s lurid grotesquerie (“When the lictor’s abdomen split open to reveal a second mouth filled with razored yellow fangs, Von Beck heard madness calling”) and byzantine politics, and the grandiose destiny he’s groping toward doesn’t seem appropriate for the grizzled, disillusioned man we first met. Still, Ferguson’s worldbuilding is engrossing, with plenty of colorful, energetic characters to take up the slack—the tough-talking, ass-kicking, red-skinned succubae are a hoot—and action scenes that are well paced and riveting. The result is a devilishly rousing adventure story.
An entertaining pistol-and-sorcery fantasia set in a mesmerizing underworld.Pub Date: Sept. 24, 2023
ISBN: 9781732566262
Page Count: 474
Publisher: Mr. Phabulous, LLC
Review Posted Online: Oct. 24, 2023
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 15, 2023
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
Read this for the action-packed plot, not character development or worldbuilding.
On the orders of her mother, a woman goes to dragon-riding school.
Even though her mother is a general in Navarre’s army, 20-year-old Violet Sorrengail was raised by her father to follow his path as a scribe. After his death, though, Violet's mother shocks her by forcing her to enter the elite and deadly dragon rider academy at Basgiath War College. Most students die at the War College: during training sessions, at the hands of their classmates, or by the very dragons they hope to one day be paired with. From Day One, Violet is targeted by her classmates, some because they hate her mother, others because they think she’s too physically frail to succeed. She must survive a daily gauntlet of physical challenges and the deadly attacks of classmates, which she does with the help of secret knowledge handed down by her two older siblings, who'd been students there before her. Violet is at the mercy of the plot rather than being in charge of it, hurtling through one obstacle after another. As a result, the story is action-packed and fast-paced, but Violet is a strange mix of pure competence and total passivity, always managing to come out on the winning side. The book is categorized as romantasy, with Violet pulled between the comforting love she feels from her childhood best friend, Dain Aetos, and the incendiary attraction she feels for family enemy Xaden Riorson. However, the way Dain constantly undermines Violet's abilities and his lack of character development make this an unconvincing storyline. The plots and subplots aren’t well-integrated, with the first half purely focused on Violet’s training, followed by a brief detour for romance, and then a final focus on outside threats.
Read this for the action-packed plot, not character development or worldbuilding.Pub Date: May 2, 2023
ISBN: 9781649374042
Page Count: 528
Publisher: Red Tower
Review Posted Online: Jan. 12, 2024
SEEN & HEARD
BOOK TO SCREEN
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
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