I don't like the Thor turns into a mortal sometimes theme that many of the Thor series cling to. It doesn't make any sense from a narrative or mythological standpoint and just feels like some mortal power fantasy nonsense that I'm not looking for in my Thor stories.

The tendency to pigeonhole Aching God as a simple Dungeons and Dragons adventure is tempting (not that such efforts should be cast aside because many a good story has come from the table-top). Shel’s debut has all the trappings of a role-playing game: there is a band of adventurers, each with a different skill set; there are monsters to slay and dungeons to explore; there are strange religions of differing morality; and it takes its characters from one side of a map to another. This formula screams D&D. I would not be at all surprised to hear that Shel took his story from a well-run campaign - a very likely possibility given his Pathfinder work.

However, Aching God, by virtue of Shel's ability with the written word and his talent for diving deep into a character’s psyche, is so much more than a game set to the page. This is a horror novel, a story about post-traumatic stress, a character study, and a world-building opener that screams at more secrets and things to come. Aching God does what some of the best fantasy in the history of the genre does in its ability to flesh out a map and trickle in enough information to keep a reader wondering with every flip of the page. Aching God is really, really good.

The story finds an aging Auric Manteo, retired from the Syraeic League where he drew his fame and fortune, once more thrust into the life of an adventurer when his daughter and her fellow compatriots in the League, are stricken with a mysterious plague. The source of this plague is an idol taken from an ancient tomb, the kind of thing Auric himself might have plundered in his younger days, and the scholars within the League (those yet alive) predict that the only thing to stop this plague is to restore the idol to its place of origin. Auric must, with a cadre of capable companions, journey to the Barrowlands, spelunk back into the horrifying crypt, and place the idol back into the statue from whence it was wrested.

Sound familiar? The concept here is nothing new, but we don’t always need something new in our fantasy - Nicholas Eames proved that with his genre-shaking debut Kings Of The Wyld. Sometimes the oldest stories, if told with a twist and told well, can be fantastic.

What is Shel’s twist? He has a few. First, and most memorable, is the way in which he narrates Auric’s adventurous past. Auric did not retire because he had a nice long life and wanted to reap the rewards. Auric retired because his last foray into one of the Barrowlands’ dungeons saw his entire party slain and devoured before his very eyes. Shel does a masterful job of relaying Auric’s last journey, mostly through flashbacks or dreams, and the more we learn about that last fated adventure, the more we understand Auric’s motivations and his fears. Shel borrows notes from Lovecraft in his depictions of the Djao gods, deities once worshipped by an ancient race but that were cast down by the realm’s current pantheon. These are grotesque beings of indeterminable size or form. They toy with their victims in an eldritch manner, worming into the mind in order to use madness as a weapon. Shel shrouds all of this in that signature mystery often reserved for ruined ancient races.

Shel also does a lovely job in his characterizations of the party. Of particular note is Auric’s companion Belech, an ex-soldier who accompanies the retired adventurer at the behest of the noble lady in whose realm Auric has retired. Belech is a complex mixture of simple man and unassuming scholar. He has faith, but is not preachy about it and seems to truly believe in the benevolence of his god. He’s also handy with a mace. Auric’s other companions are ones furnished him by the League, but they leave nearly as much of an impact. Sira is a priest whom Auric and Belech meet even before coming to the Syraeic League’s headquarters, and she becomes one of the most sympathetic and authentic characters in the novel. It is a testament to Shel’s character work that he is able to write characters with a spectrum of cynicism and optimism. Gnaeus, a young swordsman, is the consummate cynic and polar opposite of Sira, in much the same way that Auric and Belech lean towards opposite ends. Del Ogara, a happy sorceress, and Lumari, a cold alchemist, round out the balanced pairs in a way that is only noticeable upon later scrutiny. There are times when the characterization does not completely hold up, and a scene near the end in particular that tries to impart an emotional bombshell that is unearned, but for the most part I cared about these characters and wanted to see them succeed.

The only part where Aching God falters is in its ending. Shel spends so much time working towards this confrontation with the unknown Aching God, and then when things finally reach that head, it turns out to be a disappointment. I both understand and lament this. This is the first novel in a series. Robert Jordan couldn’t end The Eye of the World with Rand confronting and defeating Shai’tan. Neither can Shel simply have his characters meet the world’s biggest bad and stick a sword in him. But where Jordan succeeds and Shel fails, to use the prior analogy, is that Jordan casts a wider net with his villains. Shel makes mention of something more out there, but not until the very end, and the entire novel is spent working solely towards this one unfathomable creature. The way in which this is told, it feels like Rand is making his way to the Dark One, to further push that comparison, and when he gets there he finds that the Dark One isn’t very dark at all. I feel that this will be fleshed out in the sequel, certainly, but it makes for a mostly unsatisfying conclusion to what is an incredible journey.

I don’t know if Mike Shel will win the SPFBO. This is my favorite book so far in the competition, but I suspect others might find less depth than I have and see it as more of a simple role-playing game-style adventure. I hope people take the time to read more into the story than what’s on the surface because I do think this is an excellent book, and I expect to stay with Mike Shel for a long while.

Satirical fantasy has never been my sub-genre. I like Terry Pratchett (no way I’m getting through this review without mentioning Pratchett, so might as well get it out of the way), but not in the devotional way of many of fantasy connoisseurs. I get it. There’s no denying the clever writing and imaginative world-building, but for whatever reason my personality type needs serious fantasy. Going into Orconomics, I was prepared to like it and likely not love it. This was the right mindset to begin this book with because by the end I was surprised and delighted to find that, yes, I loved Orconomics.

Gorm Ingerson is a dwarf with a checkered past. Once considered one of the greatest heroes in the realm, Gorm has since fallen into innumerable gutters and increasingly finds it difficult to crawl out. The world according to J. Zachary Pike is one where heroism is a commodity. Heroes are for hire in every sense of the world, and like many video games of our own world, there is a system of points and values associated with questing and slaying what society considers to be evil creatures, or Shadowkin. Gorm used to have a high rank and more prestige than he knew what to do with until he ran from a quest, which in the Freedlands is criminal. Gorm was cast out of the Heroes Guild, rank stripped, and continued to dig himself into a hole by robbing would-be adventurers of their own gains simply to survive. Then a goblin is literally thrown onto Gorm’s sleeping self and everything changes.

In form, Orconomics is nothing extraordinary. It’s a book about a quest, which is a timeless and well-worn path. What makes it so good is its ability to tell this boilerplate story while inserting so many satirical references. Commerce rules the Freedlands much in the same way corporations run the Earth. In many ways Pike is just substituting specific terms and jargon and telling a story that could come out of the New York Times. This even became a slight detriment for me as the economics terminology being thrown about made my eyes glaze over, but it’s all in service to the greater effort and any daze quickly passed as a new joke or metaphor was juggled in front of me. I have no doubt that this story could not have been told in any other way, and it works incredibly well.

I have read a few different books this year that have been heavily inspired by video games. Some, like Phil Tucker’s Death March, use the literal game world as setting. Others, like Orconomics, are slightly more subtle. Pike uses the mechanics behind many video games and posits that such systems could be used as real-world structures. In the Freedlands, the Heroes Guild and the efforts to earn points and rank by slaying monsters is society’s way of forcing ideals of black and white over a shades-of-grey form that it simply does not fit. What makes this novel so competent is the pushback by the heroes against that system, even if they might not realize that they are doing so until the very end.

My only real issue with Orconomics is that Pike has long passages of exposition, or telling as those in the writing world would say, that seem to be viewpoint independent. In fantasy, it is difficult to avoid the problems of exposition because the world is always so fresh and strange that it needs explaining. However, that fact does not mean that there aren’t more efficient ways to slip said exposition into the text without over-long paragraphs of pure tell. Pike switches his viewpoints around, and it is apparent and effective when he does so, but the exposition almost feels told by a narrator in its own consistency and lack of voice.

The final point I want to make about Orconomics is a compliment disguised as a critique. There is no mistaking the satire in this work. Pike sees it through for most of the book, and it is at times brilliant in both its subtlety and overture. However, a certain scene whips away all the pretense of this fantasy novel and renders it as heartfelt and meaningful as any of its peers. Pike deftly builds the relationships between his main characters to the point that we don’t even realize how much we care about them until it hits, like a bolt from the blue, and then it dawns on the reader that the book has transformed from satire into something more. It is a beautiful moment and can not be understated. I look forward to seeing how the sequel to Orconomics flows because it will take a skilled pen to manage what Pike has accomplished with this book and yet transcend it further. He has certainly set the stage for more, and I am curious to see where this goes.

I began Symphony of the Wind with the great hope that this would be a book I would love. It has airships and bounty hunters and the world seemed well-thought out and original. The Princess Bride is one of my favorite stories of all time, and anything approaching it will undoubtedly find a soft space in my heart. I even liked the beginning of the novel. I found several of the protagonists likeable, flat-out loved a scene involving a giant snake monster, and was all set to bury myself in this SPFBO entry.

And then, as I went along, I began to find more and more issues with Steven McKinnon’s vision. At 25% in, I was feeling fatigued, and after truly stretching myself to the 50% mark, I simply had to give it up. Not only did I not want to finish Symphony of the Wind, but I was beginning to actively dislike it. I do not like to say such things about any novel, let alone one involved in a contest that is so vital to the fantasy community, but I refuse to go with the flow and simply give a book a pass because everyone else seems to love it.

There were things that I liked about Symphony of the Wind, all front-loaded towards the beginning of the novel. There are some good jokes in the book, William Fitzwilliam being one of the best. As I said before, I love high adventure where airships and bounty hunters abound. There is quite a lot of the book that reminds of me a Final Fantasy game, from the combination of guns and swords to the genetic experiments - similarities that will always draw me in for nostalgic reasons. I love multi-viewpoint narratives in the vein of Robert Jordan, particularly when they can showcase an author’s ability to speak from different viewpoints. As a recipe, I look at this book and assume I will love it, but then it gets whipped together and it’s a conflicted mess with no actual flavor.

As for what I did not like about Symphony, I am going to make a short list. This is not exhaustive, but gets to the point of why I didn’t like this novel.

-Dialogue is all over the place, like each character is from a different era of time. Conversations often feel like they are part of a comedy skit, overwrought and forced.
-Viewpoint switches seem random, haphazard almost, without contributing to a cohesive narrative.
-Format feels serial, as though this was written for a SyFy series, and it almost seems like McKinnon wants to be writing science fiction instead of this mixture of fantasy and sci-fi. He also seems more concerned with blockbuster action than with telling a story.
-Coincidences are all too convenient, contrived in a way that unmasks the author and pulls a reader out of the text, which is the last thing any reader wants.
-Characters keep hinting at their past in inner monologues, but it feels forced and shadowy when we are in this character’s head and would know what they are referring to without the secret keeping. This can be done, but I don’t think McKinnon pulls it off.
-Gallows character is inconsistent, his inner monologue is grim and dark, never happy, but he is constantly cracking jokes and appearing light. Again, this can work if there is a better transition between the inner and outer monologues. In Symphony, it feels like we are dealing with two different characters.
-Even at 50%, I had no idea what the actual plot of the book is. It spends so much time trying to push its characters towards one another that it never actually starts telling a story. Again, this can work so well if the threads are tighter and woven more adeptly.

The argument could certainly be made that I am judging this book too harshly, that maybe a self-publishing contest does not warrant such scrutiny. I might agree with that assessment if there weren’t so many excellent entries into the SPFBO - books that are beautifully written and edited down to the most minute word. And frankly, this is a contest that introduced the world to Senlin Ascends, one of the best books and series that I’ve ever read. I expect the winners to approach its caliber, and Symphony of the Wind regrettably does not.

Having not read any of Robert Jackson Bennett's work, I went into Foundryside with only the book’s description to guide me. It sounded cool, and the name Sancia Grado is rad. I don’t often walk so blindly into novels, even though I made a resolution recently to do just that. Foundryside is a good first step into such unknown territory for me. It not only encouraged me to seek out authors I am unfamiliar with, but it also introduced me to one whose previous work has lept up to the top ranks of my to-be-read pile.

Foundryside is an area within the city of Tevanne, named because it is adjacent to the foundries that make up the heart of a busy metropolis. Tevanne is a place made up of competing merchant houses - a group that used to include many but has been winnowed down over time to a strong four. Sancia Grado is a thief who exists in between the houses but with a particular set of skills that make her adept at functioning in that dark zone. She takes a job that sees her stealing from a lockbox in the harbor, and she quickly realizes that the item she has stolen is not only incredibly powerful, but the catalyst that will change her entire life.

Sancia’s specific power takes an entire book to explain, but the core of it involves object empathy - Sancia can read a thing’s history and relation to the world by touching it. On the surface, this seems an odd power without much application, but it makes picking a lock simple and it gives her unlimited access to any building. Her role as a thief is a natural one. Sancia’s power is singular to her because most of the great magic in Tevanne comes from a method known as sigiling. Sigiling involves writing arcane runes upon objects and confusing their reality. This means that projectiles can be tricked into thinking that they are moving downwards, thus ignoring the truth that gravity is pulling them one way instead of another, or that a door can be convinced to only open with a specific set of commands. Sigiling is what makes the merchant houses of Tevanne so strong - they have the technology and so have the power.

Sancia as a character is well-rounded, and while hard, she is likable enough to care about and root for. She is a scrapper, a woman with a hard-edge who doesn’t take anyone’s crap but who is secretly rife with vulnerabilities. She is joined by an equally mixed cast - a military veteran, Gregor, who seeks justice at any cost, a pair of genius engineers in Orso and Berenice whose loyalties are never sure, and a character who can’t really be written of without spoiling things but who, for all his verbal modernity, gives the novel its heart.

As an ensemble, the characters in Foundryside are both memorable and avoid the tropes of many fantasy novels. Like many novels about cities, Tevanne is itself a character. My only complaint is that we aren’t allowed to see more of it, and this comes from the over-exploring RPG nerd in me. I want to poke my nose in every alley of Baldur’s Gate or Neverwinter, talk to every character, and I have this expectation to do the same in my fantasy novels when they center around a specific place as this one does.

What perhaps makes Foundryside so unique is the author's attempt to mix cyberpunk with fantasy, while at the same time blending those themes with a logic generally found in scientific methods. To add to this, there is a mysticism to the sigil-writing akin to that found in religious work. This is ambitious system-creation, and while it is confusing (to the very end), it makes for a compelling background to what is mostly a fantasy heist novel in the vein of The Lies of Locke Lamora. The writing is good, the plot flows nicely, and there is enough left at the end to demand a sequel.

But this genre blending does not come without its drawbacks. The temptation to do whatever you want in writing is potentially at its strongest when dealing with multiple fields. Foundryside takes liberties with its rules, and attempts to have its cake and eat it too by using real-world themes and hiding them in fantasy-punk. For example, messing with an object’s sigils is a basically computer hacking on a more magical level. This made me feel, at times, as though I were not so much in a fantasy novel as in The Matrix. This is not an inherently bad trait, and that first Matrix movie is quality storytelling, but I might have preferred less nods to Neo and more originality. Even saying that, this novel does not lack for originality and stands out as a true oddity among the fantasy shelf.

By the end, Foundryside finds itself transformed from a story about a thief to something that plunges headlong into epic fantasy, and I will watch Robert J. Bennett’s unfolding of this tale with great interest. That he has only explored one city in a world teeming with possibility is an exciting prospect.

The Gutter Prayer. It sounds dark, and messy, and brimming with meaning. It sounds like the last whisper of the dying before darkness shrouds the eye. As far as evocative titles go, this is one of the best, and the gorgeous cover, the kind that catches the eye and demands to be gazed upon, only seals the deal that any fantasy fan should at least give this one a try. This happened to me, as I walked along the shelves of my local bookseller, and while the title and cover might set a high bar, it is the story within the pages that marks The Gutter Prayer as one of 2019's early standouts in fantasy fiction.

This book does something I have only read in maybe one other novel in my life - the first few pages are told from the perspective of a building (in second-person narrative no less). It works remarkably well, and while the rest of the novel is set up in the third-person tense we know so well, that first bit of prose sets a tone that this book is not one to meet expectations. Through the building's eyes we are introduced to our cadre of hero-thieves. Carillon is a young burglar and native of the dark city of Guerdon, recently returned from a long self-imposed exile and thrown into a mission with suspect motivations. With her are Rat, a ghoul ascended from the bowels of the city, and Spar, a man with an affliction that is slowly grafting stone like plates all over his body. Their simple thief job goes horribly awry, and it is not long before they are thrown into events bigger than any of them.

It is said by the sages of literature that a book needs three things - a plot, a setting, and characters. Further wisdom reveals that conflict also makes for quality reading. The Gutter Prayer nails every aspect of this quad-force, and even overlays a few of them atop one another for extra potency. The plot is grand, with implications stretching beyond the bounds of Guerdon even if the book rarely takes its reader beyond those walls. There is no portion of The Gutter Prayer that does not drive forward, with precise pacing and moments of tense action that are hard to pause. There are conspiracies within conspiracies, and character motivations that are both mysterious and engaging. The characters are fully-fleshed out, with each having their own distinct and powerful arc, and there are moments hear to break the heart. Out of many bits of truly beautiful prose, one passage stuck with me and it refers to Spar, “his heart, at least, had not turned to stone.” In a way, this is The Gutter Prayer in brief - tragic in its implications but with the simple beauty of its existence.

Part of the plot is the city itself. Guerdon comes alive in Hanrahan's capable hands. Guerdon is old, in that way that ancient cities that have been built over top of one another for millennia are old. It's Babylon and Rome and London all stacked deep. There is history within Guerdon that no one in the city is even aware of, whispers of dark places that only those deepest of ghouls are able to know. It is a place both alluring and terrifying, making The Gutter Prayer half-fantasy and half-horror.

Fantasy, as a rule, is strife with tropes. It is hard to find original monsters within the pages of sword and sorcery, but Hanrahan forms creatures that not even one’s nightmares can craft (though they might after you’ve read this). The Tallowmen are men made of wax, corpses reanimated to serve as the Alchemist Guild’s private army. The Ravellers, ancient demons only whispered of in legend, not only take the appearance of anyone they can kill, but when in their true form are as difficult to combat as the wind. Perhaps the most disturbing creatures are the Crawling Ones, amalgamations of corpse worms that take on the shape of a man, but whose motivations remain shrouded behind masks and who wield the power of sorcery far better than any human. Guerdon is probably not the kind of place one wants to live, or even visit, but it is fascinating when seen beyond the veil of the page.

Yet it is Guerdon our characters fight for as it quickly becomes apparent that hostile forces seek to plunge the city back into its darkest ages. The Gutter Prayer is a book full of gods, and the avatars of those gods, and the mysterious Godswar which is often mentioned and briefly looked in upon. While The Gutter Prayer itself takes place almost entirely within Guerdon, this glimpse into the greater vision that Hanrahan has for his world is an exciting prospect.

I loved this book and can’t wait to see where it goes next. Hanrahan has built a big world, with big possibilities, and there is a freshness to his creations that this genre needs. In world where I despair of ever seeing a sequel to Bloodborne, The Black Iron Legacy series provides a quality replacement (without all that pesky eldritch horror).