Interview with Conrad Williams

Conrad Williams is the award winning British author born in 1969 in Warrington and currently living in Manchester. He won the British Fantasy Award for Best Newcomer in 1993, the same award for Best Novella in 2008 (The Scalding Room) and for Best Novel in 2010 (One) and also the International Horror Guild Award for Best Novel in 2006 (The Unblemished). He published 7 novels, “Head Injuries” in 1998, “London Revenant” in 2004, “The Unblemished” in 2006, “One” in 2009, “Decay Inevitable” in 2009, “Blonde on a Stick” in 2010, “Loss of Separation” in 2011, 6 novellas, “Nearly People” in 2001, “Game” in 2004, “The Scalding Rooms” in 2007, “Rain” in 2007, “The Fox” in 2013, “The Jungle” in 2013, and 2 collections of short stories, “Use Once, Then Destroy” in 2004, “Born with Teeth” in 2012. Conrad Williams also edited an anthology released by PS Publishing in 2011, “Gutshot”.

This interview was initially published on Revista de Suspans.

Mihai A: Thank you very much for the opportunity of this interview.

With the exception of a few novellas and short stories you didn’t publish anything new in the past couple of years. At what are you working for the moment and when would the readers see a new novel signed by Conrad Williams?

Conrad Williams: I've been busy this year working on two new novels. One is a prequel to a major new video game from Sony, the other is a horror novel, a haunted house story about a writer. Both are nearing completion. I'm hoping they'll both be available to readers soon.

Mihai A: Speaking of such interruptions in a writer’s career, can it be said that something like writers block exists? Can an author feel burned-out before her/his time?

Conrad Williams: I don't really believe in writer's block. If you get stuck on a piece of writing, you can always move on to something else and come back to the piece you're having trouble with at a later date. As for burning out… I hope not.

Mihai A: Another writer’s tenet says “write what you know”. Was this statement a guide along your career? Are all your stories started from a personal point of view or experience?

Conrad Williams: I think all novels have to be grounded in some form of reality in order to reach a certain level of authenticity. I certainly use fragments from my experience in an attempt to reinforce much of the made-up stuff. I'm sure all writers must do that to a lesser or greater degree.

MA: Plenty of your short stories are centered on the places or memories of your childhood. Is this a way to feed your nostalgia? At the same time, are your stories a method of exorcizing your fears?

CW: I think back to my past more and more, and I'm planning a novel called WIRE, set in my home town. It's about a young boy growing up under the shadow of the Yorkshire Ripper. It's also about single gloves, a passion of mine. I wrote a blog post for Mulholland Books, now appearing on my own website, which gives a little insight into what kind of novel it is likely to be.

MA: Speaking of nostalgia, “The Veteran” is a story of a man looking in the past, while “The Pike” talks about missed chances. I believe that at some point in your life a football career was possible for you. Do you regret not taking the path of that career? If it were possible, would you have changed your writer career, as successful as it is, with a football one?

CW: No, I was never good enough to play professional football, as much as I would have liked to have turned out for Liverpool FC. I was pretty good, and I still play regularly, both for my local five-a-side team and England Writers. It helps that I'm naturally left-footed, right-footed players are more common so there's more competition for those positions.

MA: Besides the personal approach of a writer of his stories how important is originality in today’s fiction? Do you believe that today’s horror and dark fantasy, genres you write in, need more originality or are going in the right direction?

CW: It's all been done before. I suppose the real challenge is coming up with a new way of offering the same story. Look at “House of Leaves”, which is a ghost story and a retelling of the minotaur myth, but in a stunningly novel and challenging way.

MA: Your short fiction, and not only, spans over many genres and was topped in 2010 with the publishing of your crime novel “Blonde on a Stick”. How important is for a writer to explore outside the borders of genres? Is the confinement to certain limits an impediment in the creation of quality fiction?

CW: I'm not sure how important it is. There's the danger it might dilute your readership, if readers are so narrow-minded as to only read within one field; I doubt they are. I had an idea for a crime novel; I wrote it. I want to write what occurs to me. If that hobbles me market wise, there's little I can do about it. I don't want writing to become a chore.

MA: In an interview back in 2008 there were a couple of questions about genres, novels not suited for a certain label or publisher, the same writer with several pen names for different genres. Are such concessions absolutely necessary for a writer to achieve success, financially or notoriously? How far would you go in order to achieve further success, both financially and notoriously?

CW: I have published a number of stories under different pen names (I have three). I'm tempted to offer the new novel under a pseudonym, just to see what happens. I don't think a writer has to make any concessions. I think you just need to be dedicated, thick-skinned and stubborn. I firmly believe that if you desire something, it will come to you as long as you work as hard as possible.

MA: Your fiction was nominated for many prestigious awards and you also won several of these awards. How much such nominations and award winnings can change the career of a writer? Is winning such awards one of your personal goals?

CW: Winning awards is not something I plan for. It's a bonus, an acknowledgement that what you're trying to do is being recognised. I'm not sure how much it can change someone's career, although I do know a recently shortlisted writer was offered a book deal partly off the back of that achievement.

MA: I understand that one of your characters, Gravier, demands an appearance in another story. But he is hardly the only one, Mal MacCreadle has several appearances in your works, while common locations or buildings can be found in your stories too. Why the need to work further with the same characters or locations? Is there for you a sense of dissatisfaction with the way they turned up in the first place?

CW: It's to do with voice, I suppose, or presence. Mal MacCreadle tends to enjoy a cameo in a lot of what I do just because I like him and he was the star of my first anthologised short story (“MacCreadle's Bike” in Darklands, 2, 1992). Gravier was enormous fun to play around with, and I think he'd a strong enough character to be able to shoulder another story. It's nothing to do with wanting to do justice to a character because of a lingering sense of failure. And some locations just get under the skin. Seven Arches, a viaduct in Warrington, is one such place that carries intense resonances for me. I saw it every day out of my bedroom window; it was both a sinister and familiar place, a fertile setting.

MA: With such an experience in writing short and long fiction may I ask which one do you prefer, the shorter form or the longer one? How can one help you improve the other?

CW: I started off writing short stories, and I love being asked to contribute to anthologies, but I set out to be a novelist, so that's where I concentrate most of my energies these days. A good foundation in short story writing has taught me to try to hold back and be economical, even in the more expansive arena of a novel.

MA: Your wife is a writer too. What are the advantages and disadvantages of having a fellow writer in the house? Can such a situation raise a sense of competition more than the usual?

CW: My wife is a writer, yes. And a very good one. She's won awards for her short fiction. She too is working on a couple of novels, but I don't feel there's any competition going on between us, though she does sometimes explore quite dark themes.

MA: You have an MA in Creative Writing and you taught such classes in the past. Is this a process that goes both ways though? How much did you have to learn from your students in your turn?

CW: Writing is a necessarily solitary practice. I don't mix with people much during the day while I'm trying to wring the words out. I really enjoyed being in the classroom with a bunch of enthusiastic undergraduates. I like being among writers. I find it enormously inspiring.

MA: You not only write short fiction, but you also edited an anthology for PS Publishing, “Gutshot”. Was it difficult to be on the other side of the submission process? Was the process of selection made more difficult or it was easier to deal with it due to your experience as a writer with the story submissions?

CW: It was enormously difficult, and I raise my hat to the career anthologists who put these books together all the time. Between pitching the idea to PS Publishing and seeing the book in print took the best part of three years. I knew I didn't want to have to deal with hundreds of submissions so I made it invitation only. Which is depressing because I imagine part of the thrill of being an editor is stumbling upon a new voice. I just couldn't cope with the stress of it. I vowed I wouldn't do it again, but you never know...

MA: If I am not mistaken, “Head Injuries” was optioned for movie with you writing the script, but the project failed to come to an end. Why didn’t “Head Injuries” end up as a movie too? How was the experience of working on a movie script?

CW: Most options never become movies. I didn't get my hopes up, despite working on the screenplay and going for meetings with Michael Winterbottom, and a script editor who was never anything less than enthusiastic. Writing a screenplay is a completely different discipline and depends more on dialogue and action to move the story forward. There's no internal narrator. So you have to attack the story from a different angle. Possibly my failing, as a novice, was that I thought they wanted an adaptation of the novel they bought the rights to. When I gave it to them, they said they wanted the same location, the same characters, the same story, but… different.

MA: Given the chance, which of your stories would you like to see made into movies? Who would you like to see playing your characters and who directing such movies?

CW: I'd love to see “Loss of Separation” turned into a really dark, intense, claustrophobic thriller. I'd want it set in Britain and I'd want British actors. So I'd have Paul Roan played by Paddy Considine, Ruth Fincher would have to be someone like Rebecca Hall, who possess that darkness, that haunting quality. Tamara Dzubia would be played by someone beautiful but fragile, Gemma Arterton, perhaps. Charlie Finglass I always imagined played by Albert Finney. Amy Slade, Paul's damaged guardian angel, would be someone like Emma Thompson. And I'd have someone young and hungry such as Ben Wheatley or Gareth Edwards to direct it.

MA: What are your other future plans when it comes to writing?

CW: I have a lot of novels I want to write. There's “Wire”. But I also want to write a huge horror fantasy based in Howling Mile about a minor character that appeared in my novella “The Scalding Rooms”. I want to write a sequel to “Blonde on a Stick”… I'd like to have a crack at an original screenplay, and I have an idea for a TV series that would be fun to work on, perhaps the perfect antidote to all the grim stuff… The ideas are stacked up. It's just getting around to executing them that's the trick.

Thank you very much for your time and answers. It has been an honor and a pleasure.

Thanks for the excellent questions. I enjoyed it.

Table of contents - "Exotic Gothic 5" edited by Danel Olson

I only discovered “Exotic Gothic” at the fourth volume of Danel Olson’s anthology series, but what a wonderful discovery it was. A collection of original short stories of a highest quality, dark stories, spread across the world not only through the settings of the tales but the location of the authors as well and published in an exceptional presentation. It is because of the high quality of the books in both content and presentation, reflected perfectly on “Exotic Gothic 4”, that I become quite fond of PS Publishing. And one of the titles from PS Publishing catalogue that held my attention almost immediately is the fifth anthology of Danel Olson’s “Exotic Gothic”, one that promises to be as great as the fourth volume is. Published in two volumes, “Exotic Gothic 5” gathers 26 stories never published in English, with the exception of Joyce Carol Oates’ “A Game of Draughts”, from writers natives or residents of 11 countries, Australia, Bangladesh, England, France, Hungary, India, Mexico, South Africa, Sudan, USA and Wales. As already seen on “Exotic Gothic 4” these remarkable volumes come with very strong line-ups on the tables of contents and amazing cover artworks, this year the first volume has a front and back cover art by Marcela Bolívar, while the second with a front cover art by Apolinar Lorenzo Chuca (responsible for the cover of “Exotic Gothic 4” too) and back cover art by Marcela Bolívar. I am convinced that Danel Olson’s “Exotic Gothic 5” will be an excellent addition to my book collection.

This year the Series has gone farther distances than ever before to find authors who evolve the Gothic genre. Authors born in eleven countries contribute new fiction (or fiction never published in English) to the fifth in the Exotic Gothic serie—twenty–six stories in all, split into two volumes.

A commitment was also made early to encourage gender balance in the anthology. After reading with shock how women writers are severely underrepresented in many genre anthologies the Editor asked, “Why are we cheating ourselves and our readers in this way? And how do we face our daughters if we perpetuate that unfairness?” Thirteen of the stories are written by women, and thirteen by men.

It is with great satisfaction that PS Publishing now presents what may be the most involving and affecting storytelling yet to appear in the entire Gothic Quintet . . .

VOLUME 1

“Preface” by Danel Olson

“All the Lost Ones” by Deborah Biancotti

“The Open Mirror” by Georges-Olivier Châteaureynaud (translated by Edward Gauvin)

“L’Amour est Mort” by Simon Clark

“Elena’s Egg” by Theodora Goss

“The Girl in the Blue Coat” by Anna Taborska

“Burial Grounds” by Nick Antosca

“Moonrise on Hermit Beach” by Nancy A. Collins

“Goth Thing” by D.E. Cowen & Danel Olson

“The Coroner’s Bride” by Camille DeAngelis

“The Starvation Experiment” by Sheri Holman

“A Game of Draughts” by Joyce Carol Oates

“Foodface” by Stephen Susco

“The Girl Next Door” by Gemini Wahhaj

VOLUME 2

“Preface” by Danel Olson

“The Sleepover” by Terry Dowling

“The Sweet Virgin Meat” by Kola Boof

“XYZ” by Lily Herne

“The Secondary Host” by John Llewellyn Probert

“El Nahual” by Berumen & Coyote

“More Than Pigs and Rosaries Can Give” by Carlos Hernandez

“Xibalba” by Thana Niveau

“Haveli” by Anil Menon

“Diabolically Yours” by Charu Nivedita

“Juicing the Knife” by Deborah Noyes

“He Who Beheld the Darkness” by Reggie Oliver

“The Statue in the Garden” by Paul Park

“Djinn’s Blood” by Lucy Taylor

Cover art - "The Gate Theory" by Kaaron Warren

As it was announced earlier this month Kaaron Warren will release through Cohesion Press, in ebook format only, a collection of reprinted short stories, “The Gate Theory”. Now, we can admire the cover artwork for Kaaron Warren’s collection, an artwork that perfectly sets the mood for “The Gate Theory”, with all the possibilities implied by the opened and closed doors, by light and shadows and of course, everything that comes from the wonderful and very talented pen of Kaaron Warren.

We're all in pain.

We try to keep the gates closed by falling in love, travelling, avoiding responsibility, getting drunk, taking drugs... anything to lose ourselves. But the dull ache remains in each of us.

These stories are about the gates opening.

LONTAR, the new journal of Southeast Asian speculative fiction

A new wonderful project for the international speculative fiction is being born from the initiative of Jason Erik Lundberg and Math Paper Press, also responsibles for “Fish Eats Lion: New Singaporean Speculative Fiction”. LONTAR is a new magazine in English, a literary journal of Southeast Asian speculative fiction. But let’s better leave LONTAR present itself.

Why “Lontar”?

“Lontar” is the Bahasa Indonesia word for a bound palm-leaf manuscript. Palm-leaf manuscripts are among the oldest forms of written media, dating as far back as the fifth century BCE and possibly earlier. They were used to record Buddhist sutras, law texts, epic mythic narratives, and treatises on a host of subjects such as astronomy, astrology, architecture, law, medicine, and music. The palm leaves were bleached of their chlorophyll, dried, trimmed, flattened, and polished smooth. Characters or images were scratched on the surface with a sharp metallic stylus and filled in with a dark pigment to enhance the contrast and legibility of the script. In order to construct the leaves into a book, holes were drilled in both sides, and the stack was bound together with cord or string.

This ancient form of writing is the perfect inspiration for the collation and curation of Southeast Asian speculative fiction. It is an early technology that revolutionized the dissemination of knowledge (it no longer had to be handed down exclusively in oral form), and it was used predominantly in India, Thailand, Cambodia, Laos, and Indonesia. In addition, lontar were used as a vehicle for both epic and more mundane narratives, as well as an early form of graphic literature (classifications for the different types of lontar can be found at Wonderful Bali).

Why Southeast Asian SF?

Southeast Asia is a region that has thus far been under-represented in the more traditionally Western field of speculative fiction. Part of the reason for this in the past has been the language barrier, but this is no longer the case; with English as the lingua franca the world over, more and more people in Southeast Asia know the language fluently. And while publications such as The Apex Book of World SF and Expanded Horizons have created friendly venues for SEA writers in English, the support is largely not there for speculative writing in their own countries, because it may be deemed “frivolous” or “not pragmatic enough.”

It is true that Western writers such as Paolo Bacigalupi and Geoff Ryman have shone a speculative light on SEA countries such as Thailand (The Windup Girl) and Cambodia (The King’s Last Song), but we can go even further to promote the genre and the region. LONTAR is engaged with publishing speculative fiction, non-fiction articles, poetry, and sequential art from both SEA and non-SEA writers, in order to spread awareness of this literature to readers who might not normally be exposed to it, and to celebrate its existence and diversity within the region.

The first issue is being prepared to be published later in August and it already promises plenty of excellent things.

This premiere issue of LONTAR showcases speculative writing from and about the Philippines, Malaysia, Cambodia, Singapore, Laos, and Vietnam. Showcased are a post-apocalyptic Manila from Kate Osias, a utopian Kuala Lumpur from Zen Cho, a haunting military excursion down the Yellow River from Elka Ray Nguyen, and a reprinted novelette about a young Laotian journalist’s place in the sensationalist future of news reporting from award-winner Paolo Bacigalupi; speculative poetry from Chris Mooney-Singh, Ang Si Min, and Bryan Thao Worra; and an unusual exploration of Philippine magic systems from Paolo Chikiamco.

“Etching the Lontar” by Jason Erik Lundberg (Editorial)
“Departures” by Kate Osias (Fiction)
“Love in the Time of Utopia” by Zen Cho (Fiction)
“Philippine Magic: A Course Catalogue” by Paolo Chikiamco (Non-Fiction)
“Jayawarman 9th Remembers the Dragon Archipelago” by Chris Mooney-Singh (Poetry)
“The Immortal Pharmacist” by Ang Si Min (Poetry)
“Stainless Steel Nak” by Bryan Thao Worra (Poetry)
“The Yellow River”  by Elka Ray Nguyen (Fiction)
“The Gambler” by Paolo Bacigalupi (Fiction Reprint)

I wish LONTAR the best of luck and I hope to see it enchanting us for many years and issues to come.

Angela Slatter and Lisa Hannett together again for the short story collection "Baggage"

More wonderful news from Down Under are piling in. After the recently announced reprinted short story collection of Kaaron Warren, “The Gate Theory”, two other fabulous writers hailing from Australia put their talent at work. Angela Slatter and Lisa Hannett are two of the most original and powerful voices of modern speculative fiction and after they proved their great talent both individually and in a common project, the excellent “Midnight and Moonshine”, they are joining forces again for another collection, “Baggage”. “Baggage” will be published by Twelfth Planet Press in its Twelve Planets series, a series of short story collections that includes excellent writers such as Kaaron Warren, Deborah Biancotti, Margo Lanagan and Kirstyn McDermott.

What Are the Twelve Planets?

The Twelve Planets are twelve boutique collections by some of Australia’s finest short story writers. Varied across genre and style, each collection offers four short stories and a unique glimpse into worlds fashioned by some of our favourite storytellers. Each author has taken the brief of 4 stories and up to 40000 words in their own direction. Some are quartet suites of linked stories. Others are tasters of the range and style of the writer. Each release will bring something unexpected to our subscribers' mailboxes.

Twelve Plants Welcomes Lisa Hannett and Angela Slatter

It’s with mixed emotions that we announce there will be a change in the Twelve Planets line up. Life happens and Cat Sparks has had to bow out of the project leaving a very large hole to fill. Luckily for Twelfth Planet Press we have a collection that we believe will indeed stand up to the challenge.

We’re delighted to announce that the twelfth Twelve Planet will be a collection by Lisa Hannett and Angela Slatter, titled Baggage.

Angela Slatter writes dark fantasy and horror. She is the author of the Aurealis Award-winning The Girl with No Hands and Other Tales, the WFA-shortlisted Sourdough and Other Stories, and the new collection/mosaic novel (with Lisa L Hannett), Midnight and Moonshine. Her work has appeared in such writerly venues as the Mammoth Book of New Horror #22, Australian and US Best Of anthologies, Fantasy Magazine, Lady Churchill’s Rosebud Wristlet, Dreaming Again, and Steampunk II: Steampunk Reloaded. She has a British Fantasy Award for “The Coffin-Maker’s Daughter” (from A Book of Horrors, Stephen Jones, ed.), a PhD in Creative Writing and blogs at www.angelaslatter.com. In 2013 she was awarded one of the three inaugural Queensland Writers Fellowships.

Lisa L Hannett hails from Ottawa, Canada but now lives in Adelaide, South Australia – city of churches, bizarre murders and pie floaters. Since 2008, she has sold or published over 50 short stories in venues such as Clarkesworld Magazine, Fantasy, Weird Tales, ChiZine, Shimmer, the Year’s Best Australian Fantasy and Horror (2010 & 2011), and Imaginarium: Best Canadian Speculative Writing (2012 & 2013). Lisa has won three Aurealis Awards, including Best Collection 2011 for her first book, Bluegrass Symphony, which was also nominated for a World Fantasy Award. Midnight and Moonshine, co-authored with Angela Slatter, was published in 2012. You can find her online at http://lisahannett.com and on Twitter @LisaLHannett.

"The Dragon's Path" by Daniel Abraham

"The Dragon's Path"

by Daniel Abraham

Publisher: Orbit Books

The review is based on a bought copy of the book

All paths lead to war...

Marcus' hero days are behind him. He knows too well that even the smallest war still means somebody's death. When his men are impressed into a doomed army, staying out of a battle he wants no part of requires some unorthodox steps.

Cithrin is an orphan, ward of a banking house. Her job is to smuggle a nation's wealth across a war zone, hiding the gold from both sides. She knows the secret life of commerce like a second language, but the strategies of trade will not defend her from swords.

Geder, sole scion of a noble house, has more interest in philosophy than in swordplay. A poor excuse for a soldier, he is a pawn in these games. No one can predict what he will become.

Falling pebbles can start a landslide. A spat between the Free Cities and the Severed Throne is spiraling out of control. A new player rises from the depths of history, fanning the flames that will sweep the entire region onto The Dragon's Path-the path to war.

There are writers who although they come with excellent recommendations and despite appealing premises for their works end up unread for a long time. Daniel Abraham is such an author for me, the volumes of his debut series “Long Price Quartet” beautifully aligned in personal libraries’ bookshelves ever since they were released, but always left aside for no good reason when it was time for a new book.  It took me five years since it was first published to start reading the first novel of that series, “A Shadow in Summer”. Daniel Abraham’s second series suffered a similar fate, only a bit more fortunate since it took me only two years to pick up the first novel of the series, “The Dragon’s Path”. Again for no good reason, but even stranger considering that the “Long Price Quartet” easily became one of my favorite fantasy series.

Even from the prologue Daniel Abraham manages to entrance the reader. A man is on a run from a religious cult, the worshipers of a spider goddess with the power to clearly differentiate truth from lie. Little is known about this mysterious man, mainly why exactly he is on a run, but the novel completes this circle to some extent with the epilogue. However, the story, or more correct the stories, found between the opening and closing acts of “The Dragon’s Path” have little apparent connection with the one of the prologue and epilogue. This false impression is shaken loose upon the complete reading of the novel though, because the entire composition has everything to do with the wide canvas of Daniel Abraham’s “The Dagger and the Coin” series. But that is a discussion to be made later on, after the next novel in the series is read.

Let’s concentrate on “The Dragon’s Path” instead. The story is told from the perspectives of four major characters, Cithrin Bel Sarcour, a young, orphaned bank apprentice who is sent away from her home town with the bank’s valuable assets and documents when war comes to the city’s gates, Marcus Wester, a veteran soldier who tries to escape the impending war and is hired to protect the caravan from which Cithrin is part, Geder Palliako, a misfit man, a knight in the war party that comes to the walls of Vanai (Cithrin’s home town) and Dawson Kalliam, one of the local barons of Antea, Vanai’s invading kingdom, who has an important part in the local political scheming. These four characters not only reveal the stories of “The Dragon’s Path”, but are also tools in revealing the world within which the novel is taking place.

Through Cithrin parts of the economic system are shown, Marcus and Geder help reveal the historical and military elements while Dawson is a cog in the political mechanism of the Antean Kingdom. They provide little pieces of information, but put together with the other particularities, rules and laws of each nation and region create a believable and sturdy constructed world. A quite dark one for that matter too.

“The crowd pressed here as thick as they had on the road. A great marble temple high as five men standing one atop the other loomed on the eastern end, the governor’s palace of red brick and colored glass on the west. God’s voice and the law’s arm, twin powers of the throne. And between them, scattered through the square, wooden platforms rose with prisoners suffering their punishments. A Kurtadam man with rheumy eyes and severed hands held a sign between his stumps announcing himself a thief. A Firstblood woman smeared in shit and offal sat under the carved wooden symbol of a procuress. Three Cinnae men hung dead from a gallows, flies darkening the soft flesh around their eyes; a murderer, a rapist, and a child-user respectively. Together, the platforms served as a short, effective introduction to the local laws.”

Daniel Abraham gives depth to the fantastical universe of “The Dragon’s Path” by touching almost every little detail of its structure, be that related to sociology, politics, history, economy, religion, geography, anthropology or civics. The world is made more believable and the feeling of archaic maintained through the way the story is told, never using the modern and familiar measurements, going instead for other methods of quantification such as men standing on top of each other for height or the number of breaths for time. It is an ambitious project that it is mostly successful. Mostly, because there are a few elements not treated enough, for instance all the different races inhabiting the world or its religious aspects. To give you an example, the world were once ruled by dragons and they created 13 races to serve them, but although we do get to see glimpses of the characteristics of every race these are mildly touched. It can be registered as complaint, but it is difficult to make one if we consider that Daniel Abraham does not build his fantastical world by dropping on the reader’s head long informing paragraphs, all the information the reader can acquire goes hand in hand with the story without impeding one another. To consider the wider picture of the entire series works in favor of this technique as well. I am certain that putting brick upon brick on the construction of this world doesn’t stop with this novel and the following ones in Daniel Abraham’s “The Dagger and the Coin” will reveal further details of the setting. In a manner that is far more convenient and pleasant for me.

The four characters are not mere instruments in the discovery of the world created here and not mere presences to help the story move forward. They are vivid protagonists, difficult to be named champions of the good or servants of the bad, each one with qualities and flaws, dreams and worries. The events around them constantly challenge them, forcing them to make decisions and suffer changes from one point of the story to another. Nothing is imposed on them though, the different courses their destiny takes comes naturally. And that makes them a set of very strong and realistic characters.

Marcus Wester is a character archetype we see very often in fantasy fiction. A veteran soldier, with a turbulent past but a soft heart. I found him easier to like than the other three because of his sense of correctness and internal turmoil, but Marcus is also the one of the four characters who changes the least from the beginning until the end. Nonetheless, his terrible personal history and the bond with his second in command and friend, Yardem Hane, are favorable points. Cithrin is a resourceful young woman that comes a long way from the start of the novel to its end. Her story is a coming of age but with fearful and insecure moments, the ups and downs experienced when handling the world on her own for the first time in her life. Dawson doesn’t change too much either from the conservative, narrow minded fellow, but the politics of the court alter constantly around him. He can be misjudged for a negative character if we consider his personal views of the world (“…the servants’ quarters and the stables were alive with stories, speculation, and gossip. Resenting that made as much sense as being angry at the crickets for singing. They were low, small people. They understood nothing that wasn’t put on the table before them. Dawson has no reason to treat their opinions of the greater world with more regard than he would a raindrop or a twig on a tree”), but Dawson just stands behind what he considers to be good intentions. And that is hard to argue when we personally believe that we have only good intentions. Geder starts, continues and ends his side of the story in spectacular fashion. From the subject of a very unpleasant prank to the different man he is in the end Geder’s character path is full of twists, sudden turns and a couple of much unexpected surprises.

The secondary characters are very convincing as well, they are an integral part of the story, completing the entire cast perfectly. Toward the end of the novel, for a short while, the readers are introduced to one such characters’ perspective, Dawson’s wife Clara. Although I’ve seen its relevance in the resolving of a particular situation and the implications left for the second novel of the series, I find Clara’s presence on the central stage rushed. I liked the further depth her perspective gives to the court politics, but I couldn’t shake the feeling that this jump is made all of the sudden. However, as I said, the implications her story arc leaves for the second novel left me hopeful for a better approach of Clara’s perspective in “The King’s Blood”, if that comes to happen. And while speaking of characters’ perspectives there is another thing that makes “The Dragon’s Path” less surprising than it could have been. Since the chapters of the novel are named after the character’s story arc it touches there are places where one protagonist or another is left in a dramatic situation but the existence of another chapter with his name a few pages later turns the outcome of that particular scene in a predictable one. Even so, there are plenty of unforeseen moments that take the reader by surprise in “The Dragon’s Path”. The stories of the novel are engaging and with plenty of tension, they take the reader in a powerful grip and even the end doesn’t offer a relief from it. There are a couple of stories developing in the novel, each moving naturally and gracefully and every time the novel veers towards one or another of the stories the reader is eagerly waiting for continuation. And while these stories seem disconnected from one another they still cross each other at certain points and the general feeling left by the novel is that all these stories will meet in a common place somewhere in the next novels of the series. Of course, Daniel Abraham brings all the story arcs to a certain closure, but he also leaves the doors wide open for the next novels of the series and do not offer any satisfaction if we consider “The Dragon’s Path” a stand-alone novel.

I’ve noticed in the recent years that I have plenty of series on my personal library’s shelves left unread after the first novel. It is hardly the case of “The Dragon’s Path”. As a matter of fact I enjoyed Daniel Abraham’s novel immensely, so much that I feel as eager as a child in a candy shop to unwrap the foil and savor “The King’s Blood”, the second novel of “The Dagger and the Coin” series.