Dead Country - Max Gladstone

In short: bloody hell. Meditation on mentorship and family and homecoming and sacrifice and life and death and love and *people* and what they are and do and why. And power and consequences.

Absolute gem of a book, right here.

Now, in more detail: I'm going to open by admitting that I'm a huge fan of Max Gladstone's work. I've talked at length about his standalone urban/portal fantasy, Last Exit, and the sci-fi/romance crossover he co-authored with Amal El-Mohtar, This is How You Lose The Time War, which won alllll the awards back in the pandemic. But it's his Craft Sequence that he's perhaps known for. The series takes place in a world broken by a magical war to overthrow very real gods, one which now blends the fantastical with the institutionally familiar. Lich Kings are more CEO's; those working magic tend to have the skillsets of lawyers or risk management consultants, except they can also bend reality to their whim. The soaring pyramids that once rang with screams of sacrifice now house the elevator chimes of corporately-driven magic. 

It's an ingenious idea. It lets us look at a mirror of our own world, explore it, criticise and understand the systems and complexities that bind us...and do so under the cover of a world rife wityh fantastical elements, from soul-powered golems to fire-throwing mages. It's just that the golems are a police force, the mages are in suits and ties, and the fire-throwing is one part incinerating demons, one part pushing up the corporate stock price. It's some of the most innovative, tightly written worldbuilding I've seen, and it's a lived in, bloody, dangerous world, from the boardroom floor to six feet under. 

An now we have a new story there. And the start of a new series, even, the Craft Wars, which sounds suitably ominous.  It's been a delight, then, to dip into the book and find it like being in a warm (blood temperature?) bath.  The well described, carefully constructed world is still there, still ticking away. And the people in it are as strange and familiar as they ever were.  Fittingly for a new series, we're back with Tara Abernathy. Tara was the protagonist of the first Craft book, a recently graduated apprentice, thrown to her theoretical doom, but too stubborn to die. And she's turned up since, off and on, trying to do the best she can at any given moment, trying to make things right, with the fire and passion and energy that will be familiar to anyone watching the news these days. But Tara is older now, too, and if not wiser, at least more familiar with the world and how it works. And as the story begins, she's going home, back to where everything started, going to see family in a small town that don't know her or like her and may once have tried to burn her as a witch. And so she'll be there, in suit and tie and nice shoes, surrounded by faces old and new, in the depths of family tragedy. A fish out of water story, but with something more going on behind it. Still, it's something, to see the cocksure, stubborn Tara of Three Parts Dead now, becoming something like her own mentor. Trying still to work out who she is, what she wants to do, what she's willing to do in service of larger goals (and isn't that what every villain says?). 

Tara is the heart of the story; sad and often alone and determined and sharp and human. But she's not alone. Her own family are there, and childhood friendships and grudges made manifest. There's threads, complexity spread all around, and you can feel old joys and old wounds laid out quietly in the spaces between words. The folk who live in the backwoods space that Tara once called home are familiar and strange, happy with who and what they are, perhaps (or not), but as proud and flawed and argumentative and terrible and beautiful as any other people. Though Tara's here on big city wings, it's not always her way that's right - or, indeed, her way that's wrong. Both she and those around her need to dig a little deeper, empathise and understand. But of course, they have other problems. Still, the characters, well, you'll remember them all long after you close the book. They're smart, funny, gentle, vicious, troubled, broken, in love, out of love....so many things. But for all that, they are. And the story makes them come alive for us, makes us care about them, about this little town and what happens to it, about Tara and her relationships, and her family. About what might happen next. 

And that's the story, isn't it, what happens next. Because as the pages turn, it's clear that Tara doesn't jsut have a family crisis on her hands. Or a chance to drop in and one-up the local yokels with her big city ways. There's crisis here, fires to be put out before they become something new. Old scores to settle and old cuts to heal, or re-open. I don't want to spoil any of it, because honestly I was spellbound throughout, always looking to see the next turn in the story, watching the stakes go from intimate to epic life-and-death and back again, seamlessly, beautifully. Gladstone can write.  he can give you people to care about, he can give you a beautiful, precision-crafted setting, and he can give you a compelling story that just. Won't. Let. Go. And he does. I don't want to spoil it, but I sat up all night reading it, and I don't regret a moment of it. 

If you enjoy clever, thoughtful, emotionally raw, richly crafted fantasy, then this is a book you can't afford to miss. Much like all his other books, this is some of the best work I've read in years. Go get a copy, right now, and let me know what you think!