Dangerous To Know - K.T. Davies

Dangerous To Know is the first in a duo of fantasy novels by K.T. Davies. It follows the misadventures of the titular Breed, a misanthropic, magically engineered killing machine, as he tries to escape the attentions of his sociopathic mage of a mother, the curse of a demon, and a whole host of others that would like to kill him. Usually with cause. It’s got magic, history to go with it, as well as complex, evolving characters with a penchant for vicious banter, and steel-edged, page turning plot. It is, in short, a lot of fun.

As the title may indicate, Breed is the centrepiece of the text, and a rather dangerous one at that. Breed is a Warspawn – or at least, partially. These were monsters, bred for war in long ago battles against demons and hordes of darkness. Now they’re socially and politically suspect. Nobody likes a seven-foot lizard who can eviscerate them on a whim, after all. Especially when they’re a minority, and easy to blame. It does allow the text to quietly explore ideas of social and racial stereotyping, looking at the Warspawn as a group, looked down on and maligned by the majority of the population that they were originally built to help preserve.

Breed is a reaction to that. He’s smart, often sharp enough to cut himself. But he’s also got something of a temper, paired with an absolute refusal to take any crap. From the reader’s point of view, this is an absolute delight – watching Breed meet repression with a mixture of sarcasm and brutality never gets old. It does, however, tend to escalate, leading him into rather a lot of trouble. Breed is also reliably selfish. People haven’t been good to him, and his public face is one which rejects intimacy or even friendship, in favour of sticking knives into people and lifting their wallets from their still cooling corpses. Breed has been shaped by his environs, and it’snot a good look, to put it mildly. On the other hand, though he’s always willing to sacrifices a comrade if necessary, or take ruthless and brutal action when required, there’s still a lot of raw emotion floating round internally. Some of it is rage, lets be fair. Actually, rather a lot of it is rage. But if he doesn’t like the group of people he’s with, still he doesn’t find it in himself to throw them away. At least not often. Unless it’s necessary.

Breed’s journey here is one which isn’t deliberately of self discovery. Still, in achieving his goals, in tearing free from the enforced obligations which keep him inside the social constructs which have shaped and denigrated his people, Breed will get closer to understanding himself, and maybe making something of his own purpose.  In the meantime, however, he has to fend off the geas of a demon, and retrieve the weapon of one of humanity’s greatest heroes. In which quest, he has some help. That help, admittedly, consists of a quiet girl, a semi-senile, drug-addled geriatric, and a priest-magician with what Breed feels are far too many morals. The first two are sadly underutilised; where they’re in the frame, it’s often for last-second assistance, comic effect, or the odd bit of foreshadowing. I liked what I saw of them, but as it was infrequent and from Breed’s perspective, it felt like the surface over deeper seas. Still, when they were there, they were engaging; it would’ve been great if they had a little more to do. The priest, however, gets a little more room. An idealist, he’s striving to both prepare the world for what he foresees as a time of coming darkness, and to stop the population from blaming everything on the already looked-down on non-human population. Thankfully, that idealism is backed up by some serious magical firepower. The clash between this idealism and Breed’s hard-headed pragmatism leads to some excellent, if often unspoken, dialogue, and lets us contrast our protagonist with a person who, in a simpler book, would be the hero.

Together, this merry band of occasionally bloodthirsty lunatics set out to find an artefact and, coincidentally, save the world – or, at least, stop it from getting any worse. In order to do that, there’s quite a lot of flashy magic, combined with some kinetically charged and rather visceral fight scenes, both of which kept me turning the pages. They were helped along by Breed’s pragmatically selfish character, which came with enough raw emotion to make him feel like a person, behind the words. Possibly not a very nice person, but that wasn’t in the brief, after all. There’s also a fair amount of plots and byzantine villainous schemes, backed by some people who are Very Bad Indeed, and whose tearing up the page is an absolute delight.

This is a thoroughly entertaining, unconventional and imaginative fantasy adventure – and one it’s worth your while to read.