Scar Night
File this one under: Interesting New Finds. Looks like it could be a very good dark urban fantasy a la New Crobuzon. Lots of buzz about it (and I love the cover art...)
From Publishers Weekly: Starred Review. Campbell sets his stunning debut fantasy in Deepgate, a town wreathed in chains that keep it hanging suspended over a bottomless abyss, peopled by worshippers of Lord Ulcis, the god of chains, and tormented by a mad angel named Carnival. The author, who was a video game designer, renders Deepgate beautifully. It's a complex city of creaking metal links, stone and shadow, inhabited by priests, assassins and the boy-angel Dill, who will lead a journey into the abyss in a desperate attempt to save the city. Campbell has Neil Gaiman's gift for lushly dark stories and compelling antiheroes, and effortlessly channels the Victorian atmospherics of writer and illustrator Mervyn Peake as well. This imaginative first novel will have plenty of readers anxiously awaiting his follow-up.
Some interesting background from the author at this UK site.
posted by captstrange @ 3:34 PM
2 comments
2 Comments:
lurv Mervyn Peake! This definitely sounds like a must read!
Cheers,
Piers
p.s. he sounds like an interesting fellow too. Thanks for the link
I actually didn't know anything about this before Macmillan in the UK sent me a copy - I was waiting for the second part of Hal Duncan's incredible Vellum, but it was delayed, the PR person thought this would appeal to me and sent me a copy - very glad she did.
There's something very creepy about a world where death is not the worst thing that can happen to you, that even worse can follow, while the city of Deepgate suspended by huge chains over an infernal pit is quite an image. The descriptive passages reminded me of that jolt I got when I first read China Mieville's Perdido Street Station, which is no small compliment.
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