The Grave Thief by Tom Lloyd
I hate picking up a story in the middle! I hate starting to watch a movie after it has started. I am not one of these people who is quite content to watch a film 10 minutes at a time. So picking up a fantasy series in book three is going to be difficult. And it was. It took real discipline to get through the first hundred pages, but once I worked out who was who and what was what, this became a most interesting fantasy tale.
The story opens after the destructive battle of Scree. Thousands of men lost their lives in the battle and the city was wiped from the face of the earth. The victors have retreated to their home cities in the north and are now trying to put their lives back into some normality. However, another army has formed in the south and they are marching north.
Isak is now king of his region, a young man learning the responsibilities of leadership while trying to come to terms with what he saw and did at Scree. His kingdom is fractured by a wide variety of cults and religions. And the Gods are getting involved in the fight. Each God is gathering converts and negotiating with humans to gain some advantage over the others. As a result the society is torn apart by cults and religious factions. Isak must somehow gather all these forces together in order to stop the army invading from the south.
As with many middle books in a fantasy series, this book is filled with details that seem irrelevant to the story being told. But you just know that the significants of the Mortal Aspects will become more important in book 4 and it is important to know why the decisions were made. And it was fairly obvious that the Crystal Skulls were important sources of magical power, but little details like how many and where were glossed over in this book.
Admittedly Lloyd provided an extensive introduction, but at that stage of the book I was overwhelmed by the odd names and could make very little sense of it. It was easier to go with the blurb and dive into the story, with frequent references to the who’s who in the final pages.
This book was hard work to read. But I found indications of a wonderful maturity in fantasy writing. This is far more than the average good and evil fantasy. The cover notes compared Lloyd to Feist, one of my favourite fantasy authors. I suspect that may be a valid comparison. I would have hated to pick up Darkness at Sethanon without reading Magician. So someday when I have nothing better to do, I will pick up the complete series of The Twilight Reign read it properly, one end to the other. But as individual books? Don’t bother.
