Hiu’s Semifinalist

So if you’ve been following the Inn’s SPFBO reviews and our SPFBO Hub page, it’s probably pretty clear that there are only two books left that haven’t yet been eliminated or raised to semifinalist status. Now, I was debating how to handle this. While I could just throw out two separate review posts, I wanted to make sure that both of these books got a good amount of attention.

Look, it’s a cliche of almost every competition, but there was very little between these two. They both deserve your attention. So I’m gonna briefly talk about both of them, then announce my decision.

The Two Contenders:

Red Sky Blues by Matthew Davis

Thomas Grey, occult scholar and reclusive mage, is having a terrible day. Down on his luck and facing a looming electrical bill, he is hired by the supernatural overlord of his hometown to track down a magical book of colossal cosmic evil: The Libro Nihil. The hunt leads Thomas on an adventure across the sleepy cow town of Hanford steeped with mystery, magic, and an absurd amount of mayhem.

Aided by his crotchety, spell-slinging mentor as well as his friend and sometimes bodyguard, Thomas finds himself embroiled in a bizarre and terrifying conspiracy to awaken a sleeping evil that promises to push his magical prowess and threshold for pain to their limits.

It looks like a bad, bad day to have gotten out of bed. But a guy’s got to get paid.

Red Sky Blues is a book that threads the needle between originality and familiarity. It has the sarky, somewhat-magical urban fantasy protagonist, and a very distinct first-person voice to it which pulls you into the story and helps to sink you into the aforementioned main character’s perspective.

In this book, there are layers to reality. There’s the normal everyday stuff that you or I can see, but certain others (like Thomas) can shift their vision through the layers to see the magic. That makes it sound somewhat more wondrous than it actually is, however, because most of the magic in this book is more “Lovecraftian horror” than it is “fairies twinkling in the sunlight”.

I was, admittedly, a little worried by the opening chapter. I was digging the voice from the start, but our introduction to Thomas starts with him walking into a coffee shop that dares to be “trendy”. He consults the menu, confirms with the barista that they do in fact sell coffee (“the regular kind”), and orders a small one. All the while, the barista gives angst-laden sighs, and grinds his teeth at the lack of respect shown towards pseudo-Italian naming conventions. It’s a very small scene, clearly meant to establish character — Thomas is a grumpy sort — but it did have me worrying that this was going to be one of those books that spends too much time raging at “how things are these days” and not enough time telling a story. Thankfully, it wasn’t.

Matt Davis nails that “shit has hit the fan and we can’t find the plug to turn the fucking thing off” feeling — something I believe is a key piece of what makes a great urban fantasy. There are some fun supporting characters, some lovely drops of lore and backstory that tie into the narrative in interesting ways, and a herd of zombie pigs (ZOMBIE PIGS!). Thomas’ cynical, panicked voice was my favourite aspect while reading, and this is something I’m always looking for in my SPFBO allocation (the voice, not the panic). In my opinion, those books with the strongest voice are those you remember most.

As far as criticisms go… While this is obviously a very personal thing, I feel that Red Sky Blues could have felt more cohesive. While there’s a strong narrative thread that pulls the reader along (which mostly involves Thomas asking “Who the fuck are you? What the fuck is that? Why and how the fuck is this happening?), parts of the book felt a little disjointed. Particularly towards the end. While there is the traditional UF magical clusterfuck ending, this only takes us to the 80% mark.

The remainder of the book features some short stories that give us more insight into Thomas’ character and look to set the scenery for future books in the series. I had mixed feelings on these shorts. They added quite a bit, but I felt that those additions could have been incorporated into the end of the main story in a neater way.

Red Sky Blues has a lot of character, a lot of action, and even a little bit of comedy (though one joke in particular didn’t sit well with me). If you’ve enjoyed books like the Dresden Files or Rivers of London, but wish the cynicism could be dialled up to 11, this is the book for you.

Add Red Sky Blues on Goodreads.

Kept From Cages by Phil Williams

No one returns from Ikiri.

Reece’s gang of criminal jazz musicians have taken shelter in the wrong house. There’s a girl with red eyes bound to a chair. The locals call her a devil – but Reece sees a kid that needs protecting. He’s more right than he knows.

Chased by a shadowy swordsman and an unnatural beast, the gang flee across the Deep South with the kid in tow. She won’t say where she’s from or who exactly her scary father is, but she’s got powers they can’t understand. How much will Reece risk to save her?

On the other side of the world, Agent Sean Tasker’s asking similar questions. With an entire village massacred and no trace of the killers, he’s convinced Duvcorp’s esoteric experiments are responsible. His only ally is an unstable female assassin, and their only lead is Ikiri – a black-site in the Congo, which no one leaves alive. How far is Tasker prepared to go for answers?

I’ve commented a few times that several of the books in my batch stick to well-trodden paths in terms of trope usage, character archetypes, and so on. From that perspective, Kept From Cages is probably the most original book in my batch. A gang of criminal jazz musicians? Yup, pretty sure I’ve never read that before.

Kept From Cages is the kind of contemporary fantasy that has more in common with paranormal TV shows than it does with most other books in its genre. There are two main POVs here. There is the Cutjaw gang, who are the aforementioned criminal jazz musicians out of Cutjaw, Louisiana. Then there is Environmental Agent Sean Tasker, who looks into the crimes and general weird shit that happens in the wake of certain multinational companies. For many of his chapters, Tasker is accompanied by a manic-pixie-murder-girl type named Katryzna.

The premise of Kept from Cages is pretty simple. Reece and the Cutjaw gang adopt a slightly spooky prophetic girl named Zip, and spend much of the book running from a big beastie that’s trying to kill them while they look at returning Zip to her father. Tasker and Katryzna, on the other hand, do some international detective work in order to find out the cause of a couple mass murders. (By which I mean that Tasker does the detective-ing while Katryzna shoots a bunch of people.)

Honestly, in terms of my thoughts on this book, it’s a tale of two POVs. For the most part, I really enjoyed the Cutjaw chapters. Their chapters felt very voice-y and original, and I loved the dynamic between the group and Zip. The whole “running from the mysterious monster trying to kill us” vibe was something I had a lot of fun with. I thought that the portrayal of a Louisiana accent was a bit heavy-handed or eyebrow-raising at times, but I’m not familiar enough to question the accuracy.

Tasker’s chapters though… yeaaah I’m gonna have to talk a bit about Tasker. At first I found his chapters confusing and a bit boring. Then I actively began to dislike them. Only around the 50% mark did I start to warm to them. Some of this is to do with the fact that I rarely like manic-murder-hobo type characters, so Katryzna never worked for me. Most of it, though, was to do with infodumping.

There’s a skill to delivering information, I think. And a lot of it relies on following the patterns that readers have subconsciously picked up on over the years. When a piece of information is important to the story, rather than just “flavour”, it should be signposted in some way. It should stand out in a way that makes a reader tuck it away for later reference. Think isolated paragraphs, or sentences structured in a way to highlight a point.

I think my problem with Tasker’s early chapters in Kept From Cages is that this signposting wasn’t really there. Or, at least, I thought it could have been clearer. I was drowned in so much information about the politics of the world that I couldn’t retain any of it. There was a habit of burying the lede, and so several times I found myself having read 3 or 4 pages before realising that I hadn’t taken anything in.

(Though, funnily enough, that last point does show just how readable the author’s prose can be. I thought that the Cutjaw chapters in particular had a kind of syncopated rhythm to them that I really enjoyed, though this may not be to everyone’s tastes.)

Past that 50% mark though, my frustrations with Tasker died down quite a bit. The POVs converge, there are a bunch of freaky scenes and big reveals, and the book ends with space for a sequel. It turns out that this book ties in to Phil Williams’ other series, which allowed me to make sense of a few moments where it felt like I was missing some reference. I would have liked the ending to be more… emphatic? But that’ll be a very personal thing, as I’m a huge endings guy.

There were sections of Kept from Cages that I really, really enjoyed, but given the alternating POVs, the early parts of this book were an exercise in frustration. This has one of the strongest and most attention-grabbing opening chapters of all the self-published books I’ve ever read. But, for me, that momentum was immediately arrested by the second chapter. It’s hard to give my overall opinions on this one, because while the highs were high, the lows were very low. In the end, though, It’s a book that I’d definitely recommend to the right reader. While I had my frustrations, I can’t deny that I was really enjoying myself with this one.

Add Kept From Cages on Goodreads.

My Semi-Finalist

So, yeah. This was a close one. Both books had aspects that I really enjoyed, but I did also have my criticisms.

This was close enough that I felt that both books deserved to share this announcement post. So if you’ve skipped down here to catch the announcement without reading the reviews (I see you!)… please, go back and give them a read after you’ve gotten your semifinalist fix.

My semifinalist for this year’s SPFBO is…

Congratulations to the semifinalist, and commiserations to my 2nd placed author! For the readers, the margins here were razor-thin, so be sure to check both books out.

The Inn will be back before the end of October to announce our finalist! In the meantime, check out all of our reviews and semifinalists on our SPFBO Hub.