Four Winds – One Storm: The Bone Brick City by Aaron Hollingsworth
I got this book as an ARC from the author, who found me on goodreads. He warned me that the copy I was going to get was not formatted well, so I’ll assume that if you buy this book the weird margins and tabs and whatnot will be fixed.
This book is hard to describe. My best effort is that it’s kind of like a wild western mystery, but it’s crazy Akira-like fantasy, and the post-apocalyptic fantasy elements are so out there that it almost feels like hard sf. There’s only one human in the book, that I recall, and he’s like a cross between a hardcore SCA heavy fighter and a biker-knight. Hard to describe, right?
The best thing about this book is that, creatively speaking, it knocks it out of the park. You have weird religions, bizarre magic, and a society in which various types of non-human humanoids interact with one another. The damsel-in-distress is a violet-haired orphan who practices a deadly and forbidden type of blood magic in which she can shoot her veins out of her skin and attack people with them, read memories by tasting blood, shapeshift, and even get energy by feeding on others. You also have men made of stone, winged humanoids (and non-winged versions) and all kinds of strange monsters.
The worst thing about the book is the same thing as the best thing. It was so weird that I felt like I was reading a book in a language I didn’t understand very well. The author hits you with so many new things that it’s hard to follow them all, even with the glossary in the back. I had trouble remembering which characters could fly, which ones were made of stone, which ones lived for a long time, and figured that I would just pick it up as I went along. By about 100 pages in, I was better, but if you quizzed me on it I’d probably get a C-.
The plot involves tracking down a series of strange murders in which people are robbed of watches and blinded, but only blinded psychically. The victims can still see by looking in mirrors. The heroes try to figure out why the victims were chosen and what the attackers wanted. There are hints that it has something to do with the violet-haired bloodmage’s past. (Oh, her name is Polly Gone, a name that will probably annoy a lot of people, but I thought it was clever.)
I can’t say this was my sort of book. It hit me with too much strangeness for my comfort, and the characters didn’t really enchant me. I gave it about 150 pages and then decided to abandon it in the Mexico airport, (where some poor sap will probably tear his hair out trying to find “tendyke” in his Spanish-English dictionary.) I can’t really say I don’t recommend it, only that I hope by reading this review you’ll know if this is your book or not. If you’re looking for something very different from, well, everything, this might be your cup of tea.
