Tuesday, October 26, 2021

SciFi/Fantasy Book Review: The Gutter Prayer by Gareth Hanrahan

 




The Gutter Prayer is the first in an epic fantasy trilogy recently concluded by Gareth Hanrahan.  It is very much a traditional-esque epic fantasy type novel - or at least traditional in the 90s and early 00s sense, featuring a world filled with warring gods and a city with various factions: a thieves guild that used to support the common man,  an alchemist's guild with magical cops, ghouls and non-human creatures, religions and priesthoods with power, etc.  It's not a novel that deals more than superficially with serious themes at all, and is the first in a trilogy, but does attempt to wrap things up here in a satisfactory fashion, so you can read this without committing yourself to reading the overall trilogy - which is good because each book is around 500-600 pages long.

And well, I think a younger version of me, less well-read, might've enjoyed the Gutter Prayer more.  It does nothing poorly, and works its characters and factions rather well, and again ends on a satisfying note to the point where I didn't realize at first this was meant to be the start of a trilogy.  And yet, I never really fell in love with any of the characters, the most prominent of which just felt like another version of a character I'd seen done many times before, the dialogue never really pops, and while none of the characters are done poorly, none of them stood out.  And without really any big dive into any serious themes as is common in many modern epic fantasy novels, it just made this book feel a bit empty as a result.  It's fine, and if it was 300 pages long instead of 500-600, I'd probably find it a lot more satisfying, but I expect more from a page length like this these days.  
------------------------------------------------------Plot Summary-----------------------------------------------------
The City of Guerdon is an oasis in a world torn apart by the Godswars.  Years ago, the saints of the Kept Gods liberated the city from its cruel god rulers, the Black Iron Gods.  Since then, there have been no deadly gods running the city and demanding that its populace commit sacrifices and cruelties, and the city has mostly been at piece, even as its politics is dominated more and more not by the Keeper religion, but by the Alchemists and the underground Thieves Guild, the brotherhood.  

But when three thieves - a human girl Cari, a ghoul known as Rat, and a stone man known as Spar - follow orders of the current head of the Guild to try to rob the House of Law, everything begins to change....especially when another set of thieves also breaks in and blows up the entire House of Law.  Soon the three of them find themselves caught up in a series of conspiracies that are decades old, which threaten to change the balance of power in the city, and to unleash powers long forgotten upon its unsuspecting populace.  

It will take their combined actions, especially that of Cari, who begins having visions brought upon by some mysterious gods, to turn the tide and save the city they now occupy....and their own lives.  But the source of Cari's visions is likely not benevolent, which raises the question: can she find a way to use this power for good despite its source?  Or will she be the source of the city's damnation?  
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The Gutter Prayer is an epic fantasy story with a decent set of characters, factions, types of beings, and more, such that there's a lot going on in the story at any given time, with many characters having their own often conflicting agendas.  As such, it won't surprise anyone that the story is told from multiple perspectives, with the story bouncing between the point of views of various characters in between multiple chapters.  Some characters are clearly more important than others (Cari is basically the main protagonist) but the book for better or for worse is constantly checking in with the perspectives of various characters to give the reader a wide view of what's going on - do note of course, that some of those characters may not be safe from the story - this is dark epic fantasy take, even if it's not fully grimdark overall.  

The result is a book with some solid characters, although they rarely get much better than that (and aren't helped by a lack of particularly snappy or well done dialogue - it's not wooden, but it never really stood out).  Carillon "Cari" Thay is your lead character, and readers who are well-read will recognize her archetype - the girl who ran away from her family, who just wants to be free but finds herself tied temporarily to the hated head of the local thieves' guild, and who seriously considers running away when she gets caught in the schemes of gods....but can't leave her friends behind.  Your typical young scrappy thief with a heart of gold, even if she'd deny it, and she's enjoyable to read, but never really someone compelling, even as she winds up wielding to some extent the power of gods.  The same is true of other characters, like the stone man Spar, son of the former head of the thieves who fought for the poor, who finds it hard to muster up the courage to fight the new clearly corrupt head because of how much he supports the brotherhood, all the while suffering from a condition that requires him to obtain constant doses of alchemical substance in order to survive.  And there's a whole bunch of others as well - who again are generally done well, but never really stand out.  

The same is true of the book's setting - the gods and how they work through saints, essentially overpowering their saints in exchange for gifting them power (and the Keeper Gods, who are basically kept limited to prevent them from going overboard on humans) are kind of interesting; the various types of non-human creatures and cultures like the Ghouls and Crawling Ones are well portrayed and make sense; the various factions and police forces, plus independent bounty hunters like one major character all come together to form a believable coherent whole.  And yet while it's all well done, none of it is done in a way that's anything different from what you've seen before, or stands out in any creative way - despite the use of alchemical candle creatures made from corpses as cops and enforcers or an alchemist leader who uses multiple bodies.  It just kind of feels like a thing that's there, rather than anything that stands out.  

And the story, which does come together in the end, never really feels like it's trying to say anything particularly interesting.  You could easily see themes of power and inequality being a thing here, but the book never really gets into any of it; you could see questions of destiny becoming a major question here, but again that never really gets much focus from the book, etc. etc.  Some of this may be because of how many threads the book is trying to pull off at once - and the book DOES manage to pull these off for the most part - but in spreading itself so thin, it prevents any one point from getting too interesting.  And then at the end of the book, there's a major plot twist which doesn't quite come out of nowhere, but just doesn't really feel like it works, and an attempt to justify the book's one act of sex (which makes little sense at the time) that just feels pulled out of its ass.  

Basically, that's the thing with The Gutter Prayer - it tries and does do a lot of things well, but is doing so many epic fantasy things at once that it never really coheres in any single area to become notable or especially good.  I never wanted to put it down, and had a day where I was stuck indoors due to a hurricane to plow through it, but at the same time I don't now feel any interest in trying the rest of the trilogy either.  There's so much better and more interesting out there in epic fantasy with some similar ideas, that when I come across a book like this, it just feels blah by comparison nowadays.  

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