The Barrow, Book 2 and Book 3, by Mark Smylie
4.0 Stars
11-15-2021

Great, but also greatly deranged. Continues the story of Stepjan Blackheart, a power-hungry power-bottom who lives for drama, as well as a cast of 100+ other characters as they slowly, ever so slowly, advance the timeline of the Known World.

First the good. At least to my mind, Smylie is an excellent writer. I love his little vignettes, I love his world building sensibilities, and I think he writes great pieces of action-horror. I came into this book with zero excitement, but within ~20 pages I was remembering why Smylie is such a personal favorite. I like that Smylie creates something different; he has a style and a world that is refreshingly separate from the main lines of fiction and fantasy. There were some slight, slight nods to contemporary politics in these books, and while it is nice to know that Smylie is on the good side politically/culturally, I was also saddened to find even the lightest connections between the world he creates and our own dumb timeline. Other notes: a character from the Artesia RPG's sample adventure makes an appearance in the first book, which I know because my brain decided that particular bit of information would be worth preserving for 20 years. Thanks brain, top notch work.

And now, the not so good. As best as I can figure out, Smylie started out trying to write a gigantic, Game-of-Thrones style saga that would cover massive events from many different angles over many different years. He then realized, like a indie-dev trying to make an MMO, that whoa this is actually a vast amount of work and there is no way I will ever finish this. And so in these books we are getting the pieces that Smylie did finish, but they have all sorts of oddities since they are just randomish parts of a much larger, incomplete vision. This comes through clearly in the first book, which is ~200 pages long, and introduces well over 100 characters. Which is simply insane, and could not have been the intent when he started out writing. There's also the characteristic Mark Smylieisms, e.g. the random mixing of in-depth lectures on geography, history, religion, trade, dynastic relations, etc. etc. with action-horror, ultra-gruesome magic, fairly complex deceptions and spy work, main battle, assassinations, and extremely graphic sex. And on top of that there's a complete overload of information, with Smylie dumping out hundreds of character names, place names, details of several religions, the ultra-specific details of dress and armor and armament, etc. etc. Too much, too much! It completely reads as outsider-art, which is part of the reason I love it, but is also part of the reason that people who don't have a 20 year investment in the writer will be turned off. Oh and I think a lot of the action/events of the novel will only make sense in the context of the RPG it is based on? Like there is a mechanical reason that characters occasionally launch into poetry/prayer/song, but that won't necessarily be clear to a fresh reader.

And perhaps over all there is also a feeling of melancholy, in that A) it is very unlikely that Smiley will finish his series in any meaningful way, unless he starts writing more than ~50 pages per year, and B) even the stuff that he is writing is mostly filling the details and side-paths of a time period and location that he's pretty well covered in his earlier books & RPGs. E.g. the same stuff he was covering 20 years ago. Finish it off! Mark a line through it on your checklist, and move on to fresh projects.

Anyway, despite all the criticisms I am happy that I read these books, I would buy more of them, and I wish all the best for their talented and insane author.