The Council of Shadows by S M Stirling

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The Council of Shadows is the second in The Shadowspawn series, following on A Taint in the Blood, by S M Stirling. In general terms, the book is classified and marketed as urban fantasy. This is not unreasonable since the plot is about a superior species of Homo Sapiens that’s been eating us since the dawn of time. So when you walk down the dark city streets, the next vampire or ghoul that starts nibbling on one of your extremities — without your permission, of course — could well be a shadowspawn.

In theory, these are really dangerous creatures. They not only have the usual bloodsucking, shapeshifting predator thing going, but also a whole range of other supernatural abilities ranging from some degree of precognition to low level psychokinetic ability. In other words, if you took each of these skills and attributed them to creatures prefixed by were, or to vampires, witches, warlocks, and those lucky SOBs who win the lottery, you’ve got them all in one package. The reason why we’ve seen signs of these creatures throughout our history is because these hominids have been interbreeding with us through the generations. So while the purebloods are really powerful (because they interbreed), there are a lot of halfbreeds with low levels of the supergenes, who only fitfully display one or more of the attributes.

To add to their general capacity for meanness, they are also blessed with the cat’s habit of enjoying play with the prey. This leads to gratuitous cruelty and torture, both physical and psychological. Fear makes the blood taste sweeter. Since they link at a psychic level, this can trap the prey in a form of living nightmare where the human can experience being chased and eaten repeatedly.

S M Stirling alone at the table with nothing to eat

The leader of the more dangerous faction is Adrienne. Opposing her is her twin brother (and the father of her two children — don’t ask) Adrian. At the end of A Taint in the Blood, Adrian rescues his human lover, Ellen Tarnowski, from Adrienne and, after marrying, they set off on a campaign to stop the Council of Shadows stepping out into the light and taking over the world (again). Unknown to them, Adrienne did not die (these pesky creatures are damned difficult to kill, what!?!) and now lies in recovery, still plotting world domination. The local police are trying to work out what happened when Ellen’s home burned to the ground, and Harvey Ledbetter, another pro-human shadowspawn, plots to wipe out the Council by acquiring a nuclear bomb. Yes, there will be collateral damage, but that’s a price worth paying to save humanity from a tailored outbreak of disease, nuclear explosions in our cities, or EMP blasts to disable all our technology (although preventing the nuclear power stations from melt down might be challenging for the shadowspawn).

Having all that out on display should set us up for an exciting ride as our love birds come under attack and Harvey moves inexorably closer to getting his bomb in place. Except the book lacks any real kind of tension. Apart from the odd nightmare, Ellen is untouched by trauma. She’s just emerged from being under Adrienne’s claws for six months and now she’s enjoying sex on her honeymoon in Italy. While full-blown PTSD might slow us down a little too much, some adverse reaction to the torture would offer us some credibility. As it is, we’re obliged to read through pages of fairly wooden dialogue between the newlyweds as they slowly unwind and then move off to Paris to recruit a scientist to investigate shadowspawn powers. Although there’s mild fighting in Paris, we’re then immediately pitched back into the spycraft undercover work to discuss which culling method to prefer against us quick-breeding humans. It’s all so faux-civilised as the food comes in gourmet style, accompanied by the very best wines.

This leads me to a more general reservation about the way in which the narrative is developed. Initially, I said this book was classified as urban fantasy. If you look at the jack artwork and read the blurb, this will reinforce the impression. Given the state of the market, this is a not unreasonable way to sell a book these days. But the reality is rather different. Although we’re dealing with beings who exhibit supernatural powers, a major talking point throughout is the science of it all. Yes, friends. It’s what we’ve all been dreading as urban fantasy meets science fiction. Our happy couple recruit one scientist and team him up with another from the first episode. Together, they begin a major scientific exploration of the “power” in an underground lab. This leads to very jarring changes of pace. There are some heavy-going passages of speculation and observation where we’re supposed to be interested in how our spawn interface with the power. These are seeded through the fantasy bits where different individuals fight or snack on the local human wildlife. For me, this rather destroys the tension. If we’re reading a horror-oriented fantasy, we meet the heroes and learn to love them, then follow on through an escalating roller-coaster ride of threats until they emerge relatively unscathed at the end. If it’s a science fiction novel, we also have heroes to care about as they come under threat and use their scientific knowledge to survive. But I’m thinking S M Stirling couldn’t make up his mind what he wanted to write, so produced a primary set of fantasy elements, with second-tier characters to do the scientific work. Instead of these elements reinforcing into each other, they clash in style and tone. Worse, we also have a human police investigation that makes little progress as a third-tier narrative element.

I’m not saying The Council of Shadows is really bad, but it’s a series of unhappy authorial compromises that left me feeling uninvolved and, at times, rather bored. With a better focus, the creative work invested in this world could have produced far better results. Indeed, it does build to quite an interesting point as the cliffhanger to take us through to volume three but, by then, it’s all too little too late. If you enjoyed the first, then this develops the story in a reasonably interesting way and you’ll probably like this one too. Otherwise, you’ll need a stiff drink before starting and keep it topped up to carry you through to the end.

Jack artwork by Chris McGrath.

A copy of this book was sent to me for review.

For reviews of other books by S M Stirling, see:
Shadows of the Falling Night
The Tears of the Sun.

Child of Fire by Harry Connolly

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There’s an art to writing a serial. In each instalment, you recognise that a percentage of the viewers or readers will not have seen or read what went before so they will need helpful hints and clues. Equally, all your loyal fans remember all too clearly how everyone got into this particular mess and want only to see or read how they get out of it. So there’s a balance to be struck. Newbies have to get up to speed. Hopefully, they will be inspired to go back and catch the earlier episodes — something that’s always good for business — but it’s in everyone’s interests to move the latest narrative along. That’s why most instalments in so many hack serials are formulaic. Once you’ve seen or read one episode, you realise Flash is still on Mongo fighting the Riddler while wondering if Moriarty really did die at Reichenbach Falls. When you understand the formula, it doesn’t matter what order you see or read them in. They all just happen in the moment.

Which brings me to Child of Fire. You have to put yourself as a fly on the wall of the publisher’s office to understand this. “Just think,” says the accountant, “of the size of the fan base you could create. There’s a fantastic market for spin-offs, sequels when one story arc has finished, and prequels. And those prequels can go back as far as you want into childhood. Hey, you could even write some for the YA market. Get them hooked on your heroes young and they’ll follow in lockstep into the adult serial. It’s a trail of breadcrumbs to riches. That means never starting at a beginning because, by our definition (on our contract terms to be negotiated) there’s no such thing as a beginning, just a point of origin tetralogy.” So poor unpublished Harry Connolly looks at the dollar signs written into the contract for his first novel, acts on what the publisher says, changes the title and sells his second novel.

Yes, friends, this is truly bizarre. This is the second outing for this pair of ghostbusters and, dotted through the text are the hints and clues normally reserved for newbies. Except, there’s no first novel to go back and read how they met. We have to wait for the prequel to get the gory details of how many they killed and how our hero ended up in police custody.

Personally, I prefer my story arcs to have a better defined beginning.

That said, this is a good read. The author has a lean style and, with commendable efficiency, sucks us in at the beginning (such as it is) and spits us out at the end (not counting the teaser pages of the already written sequel). This presents the threat of predators from other dimensions within a framework of magic where spells are cast to confer a significant range of different skills and abilities. Not surprisingly, the defenders of the Earth guard spell books out of fear. If too many ordinary folk could cast spells, this would be chaotic. So, courtesy of events in the prequel, our hero is an ordinary Joe who got caught up as a “defense contractor” — think of him as an employee of Blackwater with instructions to go out and make a lot of noise, shooting and, if unavoidable, killing as many as possible (regardless whether they are alive or dead). During this bloodthirsty first outing, he actually casts a spell of his own that works as a “get out of jail free” card in Monopoly. It’s a kind of all-purpose, but close-quarters, knife that passes through anything and cuts some things on the way. This is complicated because it will cut the clothing of enemies but not his own clothes when it leaves and returns to his pocket. Our hero is the “support” for a fully-fledged sorceress who, when push comes to shove, relentlessly tips the enemy off the cliff. She is, well, more or less, invulnerable. Except, of course, this particular predator’s attack inadvertently strikes her Achilles heel, leaving our hero to do the lifting (more heavy because of his general lack of magical skills and the need for him to survive to grace the pages of the next instalment — and the prequel).

You have to be prepared to suspend disbelief on an epic scale for this book to work. No matter how many people hit him, shoot at him or try to incinerate him, our hero manages to walk away relatively unscathed. It’s a kind of magic I wish I’d had when I was younger. But, switch off the brain and this is enjoyable mayhem with a slightly different twist on Ridley Scott’s (i.e. Van Vogt’s) Alien reproductive cycle, a werewolf or two, and assorted spellcasting.

Put another way, this is a talented writer who, to earn a living, has written a potboiler intended to inspire a lucrative serial. I wish him luck. It’s just a shame he could not have used his obvious talent to construct something slightly more “satisfying”. Oh dear, a view that sounds more elitist than usual. This probably means I think this book a guilty pleasure. I tend to prefer books that make me think rather than books to occupy a few hours with reasonable pleasure. Either way, this is so much more than the mindless incoherence of the standard potboiler. It is enjoyable.

For those of you who enjoy following up on a review, you can see comments here which is a mirror site from here.

Here are the reviews of the other two volumes in the series: Game of Cages and Circle of Enemies.