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.

This was refreshingly different. A steampunk fantasy, with a definite focus on innovation. I had seen some good reviews of this series which left me intrigued so was quite excited to pick up the book. The imagination on display here is impressive. It avoids most of the fantasy tropes and instead builds a fresh and suitably grimy world all of its own. The three lead characters of a saint, a ghoul and a stoneman make for an unusual set up to start with. The vast array of other characters and creatures brought in (eg the Tallowmen, the Ghoul elders, the Raveners, the Crawlers) show that this is not some run of the mill fantasy with off the shelf fantasy monsters. The descriptions of these monsters really are quite disturbing too - the crawlers for example are a swirling mass of worms wearing a mask, the tallowmen are dead people who have been rendered down and then had their spines lit like a wick. This is some dark, dark imagery!

The religious mythology of this world is a key element of this story (as evidenced from the title) and is again cleverly done. The gods have their avatars (‘saints') who gain unusual powers but are essentially human. In other parts of the world their is a ‘godswar' on where these beings of incredible power are fighting one another and unleashing a madness on everyone else trough the extreme powers being used. The main location used here is neutral in this conflict, making money by supplying the weapons being used in this war.

The plot is largely following one of these saints as they discover their sainthood and the pantheon on which they are linked. This particular saint is a thief and as such this is mainly dealing with the underworld. The grey and murky morals involved blend well the grey and murky world built.

This book is dark. It is also brilliant

3.25 out of 5 stars

A ghoul named Rat, a man degenerating into stone, and an orphan thief with a mysterious gift work together to uncover a dark conspiracy in an ancient city filled with tunnels, monsters, and dangerous gods.

Author Gareth Hanrahan has built an undeniably cool world that crackles with dark energy. The monsters that patrol and infest the city of Guerdon are human enough to be comprehensible, but grotesque enough to be creepy and unnerving. The architecture of the city itself is imaginative and fun to explore, with layers upon layers built atop the haunted past they've tried to bury.

I had a difficult time connecting with Hanrahan's writing style, which felt a bit stiff and difficult to lose myself in. The book never sucked me in the way I wanted it to, but the concept and tone were enticing enough to keep me going. I'll be intrigued to see where the sequel goes after The Gutter Prayer's game-changing final act.

See this review and others at The Speculative Shelf.

This book had me in the very beginning, lost me in the middle, and then found me again near the end. The writing was very dark and engaging, but for some reason all the middle banter and groups of main characters splitting off, reforming differently, and splitting off again was a little hard to get used to. I also feel like this book suffers from having too many main characters doing too many important things at once. Everyone has some divine importance, and when everybody does, it sort of loses its impact. I'll still likely read the second book, all that said. There was something fun about it that I liked a lot.

Very good worldbuilding, mediocre characters and plot. Too many characters, too many words, too much of everything, though. Or at least that is how it felt to me: I felt I was grinding through it forever and felt it more as a chore... and shockingly realised I was only at 33%. So probably a good book, but not for me. I also never liked rogues, and this is a book about rogues, so that did not help...

Me gustó, pero no me encantó. La primera mitad del libro es un poco lenta y se sienten como relleno algunas partes, después mejora bastante y se hace bien entretenido, pero el final se siente un poco apurado, sobre todo en los sucesos de la ultima parte.
Lo simpático es que esta narrado todo en tercera persona, refrescante en ese sentido.