Dragonchasers

I’ve been a lazy SOB. I finished Greg Keyes’ The Briar King quite some time ago but never got around to posting a review of it. Or whatever you call these short verbal spewings about books that I do…

And the damned thing is, The Briar King is the best fantasy book I’ve read in a long time! Keyes has a talent for breathing real life into his characters, making sure that each is an individual. And he has a talent for weaving several plot lines into a coherent whole. Like Mike Stackpole in The Secret Atlas, Keyes rotates through the various plots on a chapter by chapter basis. This does create the same problem that one could run into with Atlas, which is a loss of continuity if you’re reading one chapter every other night or something.

So what is it about? Well, its about the end of the world, apparently. The end of this fantasy world. The titular Briar King is a kind of boogeyman creature: used to scare small children but not considered real. Except, well, he is. And he’s wakened from his long, long sleep. Legend has it that him stirring means the end of the world is near. With him come all kinds of other things that go bump in the night.

We have a broad cast of charactors, from the forester (born as his mother was being hung!) who looks after the king’s forest, to the king himself, and his family. Toss in a very noble and pure of heart knight, a bookish monk, the king’s rather wild daughter, and the forester’s rather young love interest, and stir them up with lots of intrigue, gruesome sacrificial murders, forbidden texts, and spirits of ancestors, and you get an epic fantasy tale that isn’t even close to finished at the end of The Briar King.

Which is why I’m mid-way through the volume two, The Charnel Prince. Volume three is set to hit stores right around now, if it hasn’t already. [Ach! It’s been delayed until July!!! -dc]

In a lot of ways this series reminds me of George RR Martin’s Song of Ice and Fire series. I don’t think this is a coincidence. Heck, the series is called “The Kingdoms of Thorn and Bone.” If you liked Ice and Fire, you’re going to like Thorn and Bone. A lot.

An enthusiastic two thumbs up. If you love fantasy, you must read this book.

I actually finished reading Mike Stackpole’s The Secret Atlas quite a while ago, but I’ve been holding off on writing this review. Why? Because I like Mike Stackpole and I really wanted to like The Secret Atlas and, well, I didn’t.

We have here an interesting world that has been torn asunder by a cataclysm and is slowly rebuilding itself. There are political shenanigans going on as a few Machiavellian princes vie for power. There’s a subtle (at least at first) kind of magic that seems to arise from someone getting really good at something. There’s a whole passel of characters running hither and yon. In short, there’s a lot of good stuff in here.

But sadly, the execution fails. There are too many story threads going on here (four main ones) and the chapters rotate through them. So chapter x is about plotline A chapter x+1 is about plotline B, x+2 is about plotline C, x+3 about D, and then chapter x+4 is about plotline A again. And maybe I’m just getting old and senile, but by the time I come back around I’ve forgotten what’s going on and why I should care.

You see, the plotlines are so cleanly divided that it almost feels like I’m reading 4 books at once, reading a chapter of each before returning to the top of my stack.

Also, this is very much a volume 1. DO NOT read The Secret Atlas until the next volume is on store shelves, because there is very little closure at the end of this book. I think that the series can come together and be really fun, once you have them all in hand (and assuming you read your books in big chunks…these days I’m happy if I can squeeze in a chapter a night, which really made the rotating plotlines a big problem for me). But Atlas starts with a traveller entering a town, and half-way through the book, about 7 or 8 days have passed and we’re still in this town, talking a lot about the Big Adventures to come, but not actually going anywhere. We get a LOT of base material, though..we learn a lot about the world Stackpole has built, and it seems very rich indeed.

So although I didn’t like The Secret Atlas as a stand-alone volume, I still have hopes for the series as a whole, and I will read the next book when it hits store shelves.