A vivid and haunting fantasy that involves a mysterious city.
The lives of a group of fighters, thieves, and sages converge in a land of intrigue and magic.
Lias is a man with a tragic past whose attempt at seeking a new life takes an unexpected detour. He’s a pit-fighter, and he and his twin brother were abandoned to the care of a pit-master who oversees hand-to-hand battles—sometimes to the death—on “the hard-packed earth” of a pit. When a new master wants him to fight his brother, Lias walks away and heads toward a monastery. He is captured by slavers along with a sage named Uril. After Uril’s death, an attack on the slavers gives Lias an opportunity to escape and find Uril’s family in Yut. In another part of Yut, an acolyte named Jyn prepares to meet his father, Magus Rhune. He travels with his teacher, Yu, to his father’s mansion; it seems that his father is seeking to extend his own life, and Jyn may be an important part of that quest. Ryll, a former thief, returns to Yut at the request of his former master, Anue, to retrieve a Heart-Stone, stolen by Cassi, Aune’s lover. While in Yut, Ryll recalls a journey with Cassi to the tower of a thaumaturgist, or magician, and the shocking discovery that continues to trouble him. Vincent’s fantasy weaves together three haunting tales of magic and mystery centered on Yut, a city full of secrets and surprises. Each tale has a protagonist embarking on a deeply and ultimately life-changing personal quest. Vincent is especially adept at creating compelling characters and vividly realized scenarios brimming with moments of intrigue and terror. One of the most dynamic and complex is Ryll, a skilled thief who leaves a life of deception for a simpler existence on a mountain with his wife, Myn. His past with Cassi and their dangerous journey to the thaumaturgist’s tower provide some of the narrative’s most intense and emotionally driven moments. Magic is a source of wonder and horror throughout the novel, particularly in Jyn’s story, where his father’s attempts at immortality include using people in his constructs.
A vivid and haunting fantasy that involves a mysterious city.Pub Date: Sept. 23, 2019
ISBN: 978-1-949241-14-3
Page Count: 215
Publisher: Left Hand Publishers LLC
Review Posted Online: March 4, 2020
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
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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