Max Gladstone’s Craft Sequence series is one of my favorite examples of fantasy world building. Gladstone took the core idea of ‘what if soul-stuff could be traded?’ and built a magical system—known as The Craft—out of it. He then expanded further and asked ‘So what if a world’s sole currency is well, the soul? What would this mean for the financial system? What kind of corporate world would develop around this? Imagine a metropolis or two arising out of this system? How would they operate?’
It’s very, very imaginative and very cool to read about.
The very first protagonist we were introduced to in the Craft Sequence was Tara Abernathy, a Craft practitioner and junior attorney. The last few years for her have been pretty rough—she’s been kicked out of school, mired in conspiracies and involved int he resurrection of gods. And she also learnt of a potentially existential threat that most people are not aware of. Very fun.
In Dead Country, Tara, carrying just a few possessions, including a black folder, heads back to her home town of Edgemont to deal with the aftermath of her father’s death. Edgemont is about as far divorced from the large magical metropolises as you could get. Tara is not exactly expecting a warm welcome either after being basically chased out of town with torches and pitchforks years earlier. But the same people who chased her out now need her help when their town is attacked by raiders and the local pastor is carried off. This is the thing about Tara. She can always be counted on to play the hero. It’s this same sentiment that also leads her to rescue a young woman named Dawn from a burnt out settlement not far from town—and start training her in the craft.
The strange thing about Dead Country is that despite how sprawling and complex the Craft sequence novels have gotten, what we are presented here is a rather straightforward story that could’ve have been lifted from a western. There’s a rural town in trouble; will this outcast be able to save them? In addition to that, the story is very focused on Tara’s family story and personal growth for the first three quarters of the book. It’s a much more intimate story—and a much more linear one as well. It’s really nothing at all like the the sprawling Ruin of Angels, which was the last entry to the series. It’s an interesting change, but there was something about the sprawling scope of the other books that I missed dearly when reading Dead Country. In the greater scale of things, I don’t think Dead Country holds up as well.
Another odd thing about the book is despite it being book seven in a long running series, it could nearly serve as a secondary entry point. While the first book, Three Parts Dead, would serve as useful background, you don’t need to know everything from that book to be able to pick up the bits and pieces of Tara’s story. There is quite a lot more expository guidance here than in previous installments, mostly delivered via Tara’s tuition of Dawn. It mostly works, but I still fear that a reader that jumped in at this point would still not have a enough context to grasp the importance of certain people—such as Tara’s old teacher— and other certain events.
Especially when it comes to the very last part of the book. The last part is a banger. The last part reminds us of how well Max Gladstone excels when it comes to writing action. With these last few chapters, the low-lying threat that has only carefully and quietly hinted at across six books—something skittering just out of frame— bursts out into the open.
Yikes. It’s a long wait, with a simpler, more parred back narrative than previous installments, but the payoff in Dead Country for series regulars is huge.
And because the implications of the events in the last part of the novel are so huge, I strongly suspect that the for the next book, Wicked Problems, we’ll be expanding our focus again. I don’t think there’ll be another Dead Country in this series.
For cbr16bingo this is Smash: A Fantasy/Western.