Review: The Tower of Fear by Glen Cook
I read this book back in February, picked it up while I was in Australia visiting the folks, and even though it’s been months since I’ve read the book it still ranks as one of the most memorable Epic Fantasy novels I’ve read.
The Tower of Fear is a standalone novel, but the strange thing is that it really does seem to be a truly *epic* story – a massive cast of characters and an involved and intricate plot. It was a truly surprising novel!
The tower in question is a tower in a conquered city that was the home / command centre of the city’s previous ruler, a sorcerer of brutal power whom the city’s inhabitants lived in constant fear of. During the city’s fall to an empire from across the sea, many betrayals took place; this left the city’s inhabitants under the rule of the invading empire, with some people choosing sides and others trying to live out their lives.
Some of the characters belong to a resistance group who are focused on throwing off the invader’s shackles; others belong to a group of tribesmen that helped the invading empire to conquer the city; one of the characters used to work for the sorcerer as his most trusted aid; and then there’s the woman who loved the sorcerer, holed up and holding onto the dreams that she lost. There’s also wives, children, young soldiers, bar tenders, governors… In short, characters from practically every walk of life. And not only are there many characters, but they’re handled beautifully – they’re memorable, surprising, and alive. They all have believable motivations, stubbornness, things that give them joy and things that terrify them, and proved to me that Glen Cook knows how to write characters amazingly well. I’ve wanted to read his work ever since I read his name in Steven Erikson’s work and, just for the characterization, I’m damned impressed.
Bit Glen doesn’t only write excellent characters – the world he creates in the novel, from the city with is dockyards, alleys, barracks and mansions to the rooms that families share, and even the hints of the larger world beyond the city – there’s enough here to create a palpable sense of place, a thriving atmosphere, a landscape that unrolls in your imagination in an utterly effortless manner – Glen also doesn’t bog down the narrative; his descriptions of concise and beautiful and evocative. To say I was impressed –and that a writer of Steven Erikson’s calibre wasn’t bullshitting us- is an understatement.
But what also makes this novel so good is that there’s a sense of truth and realism to the story – there might be soldiers, magic, battles, and the story may take place in a world and city that doesn’t exist, but Glen respects not only Fantasy as a genre but also the fact that he’s telling a story about people, whether they exist or not. He remains true to what it means to be a story-teller.
All in all, if you’ve never made the time to read Glen Cook’s work before and want to get a taste of his work before getting in to The Black Company or Instrumentalities of the Night, then The Temple of Fear is an excellent place to start. It showcases Glen’s abilities wonderfully, and if he’s this good in a standalone novel then he’s gonna rock in a series, and I’ll definitely be getting into The Black Company soon. 
I give The Temple of Fear a respectful and enthusiastic 9 / 10!
To order your copies of the novel, click here for Amazon US and here for Amazon UK; the book is available in South Africa thanks to Pan Macmillan SA and can be ordered from Exclusive Books in any of the many branches. If you want to get more info about Glen and his work, then check out this link.
Until the next review (Pittacus Lore’s The Power of Six),
Be EPIC!
Review: Low Town Book One – The Straight Razor Cure by Daniel Polansky
When I first heard of The Straight Razor Cure –or Low Town, as it is titled in US markets- I was immediately intrigued. The setting –a city that put me in mind of Mark Newton’s central Villjamur, which is a positive comparison- and what I knew of the book at the time practically promised a read unlike anything I’d read before.
Promised, and delivered.
Before I carry on, let me state that if you like your Fantasy cut and dried, with plenty of battles and politics and magic, then The Straight Razor Cure may not be for you. It’s not an understatement for me to say that I’ve never read anything like this novel before – it is utterly unique, as least to my reading experience.
Character-wise, the novel is filled with both the unsavoury and hopeful, the snide and brilliant, the evil and those that just manage to toe the line.
Warden, the main character and voice of the novel, is a stubborn, addicted, short tempered bastard who has –and many times, besides- made all of the wrong choices and very few of the right choices. But his path, down through the years, has led him to a place where the events that take place in the novel swirl and eddy around him, pulling him in despite every fight he puts up.
Warden is one of those guys practically every one of us knows – you know, the guy that showed so much promise and was given many opportunities, but didn’t achieve what he could have. Consequently, his voice, the story’s voice, is pretty damned hectic and unusual, more along the lines of a character you’d find in a crime novel, that dude who survives on the edges of society and survives on that edge as well as he can.
There are many other characters that populate the novel, some from Warden’s distant past –very important characters, I might add- some from his more recent past, and others that are, in many cases, balancing on that line between grubby and truly despicable. One of the characters I enjoyed the most had a definite Oriental-flavour to him, and the way he and Warden spoke to each other was absolutely awesomely entertaining, so layered that I wondered how long it took Daniel to write those interactions.
All in all, every character hit his or her stride perfectly, in my opinion, from the young street thief that Warden meets early on to a dangerous Lord to a girl that Warden rescued off the streets when he was very young himself. The characters are definitely one of the strongest aspects of the novel, and one of the most enjoyable.
What I also loved was that Daniel revealed just enough of the world the novel takes place in that you get hints and flavours and layering’s instead of a complete picture – a terrible and costly war is mentioned, and we also get glimpses of Warden during the war; the city itself barely survived another event even before the war, and the glimpses of that are hectic enough, especially as we ‘witness’ everything through Warden’s point of view. So, if you’re one of those that loves intricate and substantive worldbuilding, The Straight Razor Cure might disappoint you – the story-world is intriguing, but doesn’t bludgeon you.
This novel also doesn’t pull any punches – it’s violent and bloody, there’s plenty of swearing, and it’s definitely not a read for young adults, so parents, read this book before you pass it on to your kids. Yes, it’s a dark, often-times disturbing novel –and like I said before, not the normal kind of Fantasy novel you’re used to- but if you’re an open-minded reader who doesn’t mind boundaries being pushed, then I’m pretty sure you’ll enjoy The Straight Razor Cure as much as I did. I’ll definitely be back as the series progresses – there’s enough that’s hinted at, and enough characters, to populate four or five books; there’s also the sense of a much larger story unfolding, and I’m really looking forward to seeing where Daniel takes us next, and whether Warden will emotionally survive the journey.
I give this novel a resounding 9 / 10 – it’s dark, brilliant, boundary-pushing, and unique, with incredible characters and a thought-provoking plot, and it doesn’t read like a debut at all. Daniel is definitely and assuredly a damned good writer and storyteller.
To order your copies of The Straight Razor Cure, click here for Amazon UK – it’ll be released on the 18th of August; it’ll be available in South Africa in September, so head into your closest Exclusive Books and reserve yourself a copy. In the US, where it’ll be known as Low Town, and will be released on the 16th of August, you can order yourself copies on Amazon US from this link. Also, head on over to Daniel’s website here.
Be EPIC!
