The Steel Remains by Richard K. Morgan

[lightreads]

The Steel Remains by Richard K. Morgan


My rating: 4 of 5 stars
Viciously gritty fantasy with a twisted sense of humor and queer protagonists. Retired soldier-aristocrat seeks his cousin, sold into slavery, and stumbles into imperial politics and a clash of elder races.

Well, damn. I was trying to think of a pithy way to get this book across. Because really, how do you explain a book whose major thematic movement is tied to an image motif of impalement – on spikes, on swords, on cocks, on doomsday weapons? Morgan has the remarkable trick of writing gaudy, gratuitous violence, then using its gratuity to push the whole unrelenting thing a bit deeper, which makes it not gratuitous at all, except that it still is. I'm not explaining this well.

I'm being kind of scattershot here, because I'm still processing. Not as subtle a book as I'd always like, but complicated, and richly backstoried, and interesting as all hell. This is not the sort of grittiness that makes me roll my eyes, it's the kind that makes the characters inside a pretty standard epic fantasy power structure into completely fascinating people. Sign me up for the trilogy.

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