The Gutter Prayer

The Gutter Prayer

This is a new one on me. I have seen The Gutter Prayer labelled as ‘grimdark meets epic fantasy', but I think that this detracts from the uniqueness of this book.
For me it' s a kind of like Gibsonian in it's outlook and the sprawling metropolis of Guendor, mixed with Neil Gaiman, chuck in a bit of steampunk, add a pinch of Mervyn Peake for spice, blend thoroughly for five minutes and hey presto, you have The Gutter Prayer.
If anyone is coming to this blind like I did, then be prepared for a shock. This is not like any Fantasy book I have read before.
Yes, there are recognisable tropes from the genre, the returning evil that wants to dominate the world, the hero who gains a new power and has to deal with controlling this power and hopefully defeating said bad dude before the whole place goes to shit.
However, in this case, the whole place has gone to shit, what with warring gods who destroy anything in their path, alchemists who transform everything into candle monsters, gullheads or some other insane Frankenstein creation.
This is an interesting book, I have to say. There are some niggles with it. It took me a while to get my head around the use of present tense and, I am not sure if this is anything to do with me reading the electronic version, but there were some jarring editorial slips in Chapter Twelve that made me go,eh?
The writing is very fast paced and instead of patiently holding your hand through the fantasy world building, Hanrahan chucks you in head first and it is a case of sink or swim baby.
The world is vastly different from other fantasy ideas. Gone is the merry clip clopping of horses and welcome to an otherworldly Victorian London.
As I said, I kind of found it very Gibsonian in it's outlook. The city and the writing style reminds me of this very much, and whilst the characters are likeable, at the same time they aren't, which gives them a three dimensional quality rather than your run of the mill fantasy heroes. I loved the character of Aleena, primarily because she reminded me of Neil Gaiman's ‘Angela', which made me adore her.
The main characters were also well rounded, with each of the three characters moving the story along to get where we are going.
Can't wait for the next one.

Wow. So. Where to start. The Gutter Prayer is definitely epic fantasy, which I haven't been reading much of lately as I didn't think I had time. Epic Fantasy is usually big books in long series - and this book could stand completely on its own, though the author says there will be at least one more book.

The Gutter Prayer also does something that I've always enjoyed but is somewhat uncommon - the city ITSELF is very much a character here. I attended a panel at last year's Baltimore Book Festival that talked about Cities as characters which, while not something I'd explicitly realized I liked, was a common thread in a lot of high fantasy/science fiction that I've loved. City of Brass and The Courier are good examples. So that was a selling point of The Gutter Prayer.

The book starts with a bang - literally - as the three main characters, Cari, a human thief, Rat, a ghoul, and Spar, a “Rock Man,” are robbing a building when it explodes. (Rock Men are humans who suffer from a magical disease that slowly petrifies them but makes them inhumanly strong.) The action doesn't let up much, from Rat sneaking through the underbelly of the city, to Spar fighting for his life against his voracious disease while trying to unite the lowlifes of the city, to Cari trying to figure out where her weird visions are coming from. We bounce from monsters kept captive in the deeps, guarded by other monsters, to city politics, to wars between gods on distant shores and closer to home.

The city is central to all of it, hiding secrets and labyrinths and ancient gods and alchemical workshops that spew horrors of their own. The prologue chapter even seems to be from the perspective of the city itself, as if watching our heroes crawl around its streets from above.

For all the action, the writing felt a little slow - as if it wasn't quite conveying the urgency with which things were happening. The actual events were quite fast-paced, I just think the language could have been more...I'm not sure. Intense, maybe? It didn't suck me in as much as I would have expected. It didn't quite come to life on the page. I'm absolutely going to read the next book, when it comes out; writing styles generally improve in the second book, in my experience reading trilogies.

You can find all my reviews at Goddess in the Stacks.